Many decisions that a government takes have unwanted side effects. For example, while everyone surely thinks it's a good idea to stop people smoking, the government takes £6.50 plus 16.5% of the retail price from every packet of cigarettes: tobacco duties raise about £8.8 billion a year at the moment.  The response is often 'yes, but if we can get people off cigarettes it would reduce costs to the NHS'. It would - but only by an estimated £2.6 billion. So the exchequer would still be £6.2 billion a year worse off if we got everyone to stop. There is a similar issue with electric cars. At the moment, the fuel duty on petrol (gasoline) and diesel in the UK raises an eyewatering £28 billion annually. If we could wave a magic wand and switch everyone overnight to electric vehicles, that income would currently disappear. And though drivers might cheer, the government would certainly not be happy. So for some time there have been schemes afoot to recoup these potential losses. I ...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from March 2015 Every now and then I get a semi-spam email (i.e. something I probably accidentally signed up to receive, but never really wanted) offering me the opportunity to buy cut-price 'treats', like a super car experience. I know some people love this kind of thing, but I just don't get it. I've got three problems with the whole 'super car experience' thing. But before that, I need to distinguish this from the early  Gerry Anderson series , which I loved as a boy. Here in the UK it was a black and white series, but it appears from the DVD that it was shot in colour. For primary school me, the best thing about it was that our Ford Anglia was excellent for playing Supercar, as the heater controls (the heater was an optional extra) made an excellent substitute for throttles, and it even had little fins on the tail, though they aren't visible in my picture below. However, I am not referring to Supercar , but rather an ...

Having recently revisited the Monty Hall problem, I thought it was worth also taking a look another, arguably even more mind-boggling probability problem that also got Marilyn vos Savant a lot of complaints when she included it in her column. The problem sounds trivial enough, and comes in the form of a statement for which we have to predict the probability. It reads ‘I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys?’ It sounds trivial. The Tuesday bit is just window dressing, so we are looking at ‘I have two children, one a boy. What is the probability I have two boys?’ So with one child a boy, surely there is 50 per cent chance that the other child is a boy and a 50 per cent chance it’s a girl. Which makes the probability of having two boys 0.5, or 50 per cent. There’s a one in two chance.  But unfortunately that is not correct. The reason we get confused is that when trying to imagine the situation we think of the ‘first’ child w...

There's nothing the right-wing newspapers like more than a touch of wokeness-gone-mad - and back in February this was trumpeted by an article in the Daily Telegraph headlined Lego can be anti-LGBT says Science Museum (this is behind a paywall, but I was able to access it via Apple News). The story has since been picked up by many other news outlets. The outrage in the press is based on a self-guided tour called Seeing Things Queerly telling visitors that 'Like other connectors and fasteners, Lego bricks are often described in a gendered way. The top of the brick with sticking out pins is male, the bottom of the brick with holes to receive the pins is female, and the process of the two sides being put together is called mating. This is an example of applying heteronormative language to topics unrelated to gender, sex and reproduction. It illustrates how heteronormativity (the idea that heterosexuality and the male/female gender binary are the norm and everything that falls out...

As a science writer I get sent lots of press releases about scientific studies. Some describe serious research, but there is always a smattering of studies sponsored by companies with entertaining PR in mind (think the ones that give the formula for making the perfect sandwich, or some such thing), rather than any scientific outcome. I've just received the most entertaining one I've had in some time, which I feel needs sharing. The press release opens with: Born in August and named John or Mary? You might be a genius. A new study analysing more than 1,000 of history’s greatest minds reveals common traits among the world’s smartest people—from birth month to name. Could you be one of them? You might think this study was performed by a publicist with a degree in dog grooming (say), but unlike many such press releases, it does refer to an original paper. Admittedly they get that a bit wrong, saying it was 'published on ResearchGate' which is a portal - it was published in ...

A book I'm currently reading ( Proof by Adam Kucharski) starts by introducing the Monty Hall problem and adds a piece of info I wasn't aware of. It's my favourite example of the counter-intuitive nature of probability, featuring at some length in my book Dice World , so I thought it worth revisiting here. The problem (of which more in a moment) gained worldwide fame when it featured in the 'Ask Marilyn' column in Parade Magazine in 1990. The column was written by Marilyn vos Savant, whose claim to fame was appearing in the Guinness Book of Records as the person with the highest IQ in the world.  (She was born Marilyn Mach, but despite appearing to have a phoney attempt to get the word 'savant' into her name, vos Savant was her mother's surname.) What was remarkable about the problem was that  so many people - some of them mathematicians and professors - got it wrong. It is fascinating now to look back and see some of the letters published in Parade say...

In their The Studies Show podcast The Science of Johann Hari , the excellent Stuart Ritchie and Tom Chivers point out the entertaining way the blurbs for former journalist Hari's books boast about his epic journeys to interview scientists. These include 'Confused, he set out on a three-year, thirty-thousand mile journey to discover what really causes addiction - and how to solve it.' ( Chasing the Scream ) and 'Finding the answer to this high-stakes question led him on a journey from Iceland to Minneapolis to Tokyo...' ( Magic Pill ). Ritchie and Chivers also include a claim for another book with a forty-thousand mile journey, though this seems to have disappeared. The podcasters point out that these 'epic journeys' seem to have consisted of flying to a few places to interview people. But I think there's a more worrying issue in a globally heating world - what was the point of making the journeys in the first place? All he appears to have done was inte...

This is Sherlock Holmes, the next generation - with Holmes' daughter Joanna centre stage. Despite the cover, where she appears about 12, presumably to appeal to Enola Holmes fans, she is now Mrs Watson, married to John Watson's son who narrates the story. As this is her second marriage and has a 17-year-old son we can assume Joanna is at least in her late 30s.  Watson senior is still around, if elderly (Sherlock being long gone), while Mr & Mrs Watson live at 221B Baker Street, looked after by one Miss Hudson... and there's even a son-of-Lestrade at Scotland Yard. The plot centres on an increasingly dubious blackmail featuring the scandalous behaviour of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's granddaughter, which Joanna solves with rather more equanimity than her father, if exhibiting many of his traits. Along the way we are plunged into opium dens, a break-in to a suspect's mansion, theatrical goings on, scientific experiments and more. Leonard Goldberg is a doctor...

Anyone who has ever had a book traditionally published knows the joys of reading through a publisher's contract. There are some bits that make you wince (the part where they throw you to the dogs if they get sued, for example), and others that are quite pleasing (usually involving money). I've seen a good few contracts in my time, both mine and those for other authors who have asked me to cast an eye over them. (If there's anything too complex, I strongly advise authors to join the Society of Authors and make use of their checking service.) Of late, I've seen AI starting to rear its head in new clauses - and it has been a pleasant surprise. When publishers started mentioning AI in contracts, I assumed we were talking about clauses that banned authors from using generative AI to write their books for them - and, not surprisingly, they have started to appear. (Publishers need to be careful with this one, as the contracts do need to allow the inclusion of content from AI s...