Now Appearing

The Bulgarian connection

2012-01-30T08:45:00.000Z

I still can't quite believe that I recently appeared on Bulgarian TV. Speaking in Bulgarian. (Sort of.) It was all rather surreal.

The interview took place via Skype, between me, sitting at my desk in my office and the glamorous presenter, Sophia Tzavella, in a sizeable serious TV studio.

We discussed various weird aspects of science in English. They have then dubbed over us (presumably Sophia dubbed herself) in Bulgarian, so you hear the voice of a suitably scientific sounding Bulgarian actor.

If you would like to take a look at me in action, it's available online here. I'm on from about 7 minutes 17 seconds, but I particularly like the shot at 8 minutes 4 seconds (screenshot on the left) which shows the studio in all its glory with me on a big screen in the background.

All in all a fascinating experience!

One more Time

2012-01-27T08:24:00.000Z

Time, as they say, waits for no person. Neither do books about time machines. Because I'm delighted to say the UK version of my book on the science of time travel, Build Your Own Time Machine is now available. I didn't get my own copies until the very last minute, so it's brilliant to be able to see it for real at last.

So run, don't walk to your local Waterstones and demand a copy yesterday. Or even easier, nip over to Amazon (there are links to do so on the book's web page) and order one up.

At risk of being a touch biassed, this is one of my favourites of all the books I've written. Time travel. What's not to love?

I'm glad to say the publisher was able to respond to a concern about the cover. The original version didn't have the subtitle, which meant there was nothing to distinguish it from a science fiction book. They were able to slip in 'The Real Science fo Time Travel', which is great.

I'm expecting talks based on this book to be popular - there are already a couple booked, at Pewsey Library at 7.30pm on 1 February, at the Scottish Storytelling Centre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival of Science at 5.30 on 2 April and at the Brympton Festival at 1pm on Sunday 22 April. You can always keep an eye on my upcoming events on the web page.

Mr Newton's Rainbow

2012-01-26T08:19:00.001Z

I'm currently reading for review a book called Quantum Physics for Poets (the next step, I suppose, from How to Teach Physics to your Dog). In it, the authors comment

A glass prism hanging in our window splits the white sunlight into its spectral constituents Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Blue-Indigo-Violet (ROY G. BIV)

Now, leaving aside the rather bizarre idea that 'Roy G. Biv' is somehow a useful way of remembering anything, I thought it rather sad that this book, written by a Nobel laureate and friend, passes on as wisdom without comment the idea that there are seven colours in the rainbow. It's a load of tosh, for which we have to thank Isaac Newton.

If you take a look at a rainbow and look for blocks of colour, it's hard to see more than six. Alternatively, if you consider the rainbow of colours on your computer screen, it is likely to be made up of millions of subtly different hues. Either way you consider it, seven is wrong.

There's a good reason for this. There was no scientific basis for Newton's assertion that there are seven colours. We aren't absolutely certain, but the best supported theory for why he came up with this number is because there are seven musical notes - A to G - before you come back to the A in the octave. If music had seven notes, Newton seems to have argued, a rainbow should have seven colours, and he came up with a set to match.

Interestingly, he was lucky to be able to come up with those particular colours. One of Roy G. Biv's constituents didn't exist a few decades earlier. When I do talks on this subject and ask people to guess which colour didn't exist they usually go for one of the obscure colours at the far end of the spectrum, but in fact it was orange. The word existed. It was the name of a fruit. (Still is.) But the colour didn't take its name from the fruit until the 1600s.

Newton did many wonderful things, and contributed vastly to science. But his rainbow colour scheme was a bit of a fraud.

Image from Wikipedia: D-Kuru/Wikimedia Commons

The secret life of the Dell press office

2012-01-25T09:06:00.000Z

Spot the contact details

I do a bit of consumer/technology journalism, which means I'm frequently in touch with technology press offices and PR companies. There was a time when you relied on a little black book of contacts, but these days you just zip onto the net and type in Company X Press Office and the details pop up. Unless you are trying to contact Dell. Their press office is so well hidden it verges on farce.

Go to their News Room press office contacts page and you are told the following:

Dell UK and Ireland Press Office
Dell Computers
Innovation House
Cherrywood Science and Technology Park
Cherrywood, Loughlinstown
Dublin 18
Ireland

Note no phone, no email. Yes, the press office of one of the world's leading computer companies only provides a postal address. Snail mail. Nineteenth century at best.

Admittedly they do then go on to give a telephone number for 'UK Head Office Contacts' followed by a Bracknell address. Ah ha! Got em. But no. The phone number is for their (Indian) call centre. Who don't have any phone numbers for anyone. At all. But they do have an email address for the Marketing department. Excellent. If you can't get a press office, the marketing department is the next best thing. So I zap off an email. And get this reply:

Thank you for your mail. Please note this mailbox is used for outbound messaging only and therefore checked very infrequently. If you are internal to Dell, please contact the relevant member of the Marketing team to answer your query. Kind regards UK Marketing

For crying out loud! Dell Marketing or Dell Press Office - if you are monitoring this (and it's not impossible, I have had companies getting in touch as a result of my blogging about them), PLEASE drop me an email at brian@brianclegg.net so I can contact you. I want to write nice things about your computers. In a large circulation national magazine. But I can't if you hide. Come out, come out wherever you are...

P.S. A journalist contact has told me who their PR agency is (Axicom), so I'm fine. But this cloak and dagger stuff is still bizarre.

Grow up, guys

2012-01-24T08:55:00.000Z

It's an iPhone - get over it

As long as Apple Computer has existed it has roused strong emotions. It has been a marmite company. You love it or you hate it. We shouldn't feel too sorry for Apple. They started it. Once they had the Mac, they undertook aggressive comparative marketing, putting the savvy, smart Mac against the creaking, boring PC. And they had a point. But back then I wouldn't have touched a Mac with a bargepole. They wouldn't work with anyone else's network, they had poor file interchangeability and they were closed systems that you couldn't add hardware to, nor could you do much with the software.

So it's not surprising that back then there were strong pro and anti feelings. But I think it's time we got over it. Macs are good computers - so are PCs. Android phones are excellent - iPhones are brilliant. As yet the iPad is the only decent tablet, but it won't be for long.

It really quite saddens me when I see the silly, unthinking, knee-jerk reactions from the pro- and anti- camps springing to life. When a while ago I contemplated switching my desktop to Mac, I got plenty of emails and messages from Mac lovers telling me that it would transform my life. It really wouldn't. As it happens I decided it would transform my bank balance too much, and didn't go ahead, but the emotion in their response was worrying.

Similarly, a friend recently announced on Facebook that he'd got an Android mobile phone that was much cheaper than an iPhone. He immediately got a string of really quite nasty comments from his anti-iPhone friends. Comments included:

Nice phone - and Samsung are miles better than an Apple! - Well, I've compared them and no, they're not.
iPhones, smart phones for the dumb - That's a really reasoned argument. Not at all ad hominem.
With Android you can set it up exactly how you want, with iPhones you can set them up exactly how apple allow you to. - I'll come back to this.
You resisted being assimilated then ! - Oh, please.

I thought that penultimate one was interesting. It was certainly always the argument against Macs that swayed it for me when I was at BA. But in a phone it misses the point. Leaving aside that there's plenty you can do to change the setup of an iPhone, I don't want to have 'set it up exactly how I want', I want to be able to take it and use it. Someone else accused the iPhone as being style over substance - but concentrating on how you can set it up, as opposed to how good it is at its job, is exactly style over substance. The fact is the iPhone does the job brilliantly without having to faff about making it work.

But for that matter, in my experience, good Android phones work well too. (The difference with Android is that you get crap phones and great phones, so you have to avoid some.) Which brings me back to my original point. Lose the tribalism, guys. Apple make great, stylish products. If you want one, that's excellent. There are also great and more affordable PCs and Android phones. If you want one, that's excellent. Arguing you shouldn't buy an Apple product is like arguing we should all drive Fords and Vauxhalls. Arguing you should only buy Apple is like insisting everyone should go for Jaguars and Range Rovers. Remind me, what's all the fuss about?

This book's a horror

2012-01-23T09:52:00.000Z

I love classic science fiction and fantasies set in the real world, but I've not ventured that much into reading horror. Okay, I've got a secret pleasure in Dennis Wheatley, and my favourite fantasy writers Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman can all produce a form of horror but I've rarely gone for the pure thing. Apart from Mr Wheatley, my only real experience is Steven King. I think some of his work - particularly It - is surprisingly well written and pins you in place as a reader. So it was interesting to be sent the latest book by Dean Koontz, an author I've never tried - 77 Shadow Street.

To look at it's quite a chunky hardback, but I found it a reasonably quick read as it's a page turner. This is certainly my kind of horror, in the sense that it's fantasy horror, rather than simply man's inhumanity to man. The setting is very well built, and the sense of menace effectively done. It's interesting that I mentioned It earlier, as in some ways there are similarities - the dark, almost elemental inhuman force occupying an island of humanity and attacking it.

If I'm honest it's not as good a book as It. I don't think Koontz produces the same quality of writing as King. It's fine, but lacks the finesse. He also spent far too long on the build. Although there are lots of strange goings on, nothing definitive happens for well over 100 pages. There's also far too much internal narrative from the characters. We get page after page of their thoughts. I sometimes wanted to scream at Mr Koontx that creative writing mantra SHOW, DON'T TELL!

And the final problem is that it suffers from California Suite syndrome. I'm sure everyone knows those films that ought to be great because they have lots of great actors in them, but that fall down because there isn't a main character or characters to identify with. Instead we get a whole cast of different people and follow their intertwining storylines. Great idea, but it never quite works. The audience is always distanced. And the same things happen here. We meet all the different characters who live and work in apartment building - but it's difficult to get too involved with any of them.

All that said, this is an intriguing story, Koontz is quite brave in introducing several mysterious and confusing characters long before there's any certainty of what they are - and parts of it are genuinely horrific in a good way. What's more there is an excellent twist in the storyline (though you have to get past page 300 to reach it), even though the premise depends on a highly unlikely coincidence that one of only two people in the world that would enable this storyline lives in a specific house. As long as you are happy with suspension of disbelief, it's definitely a book I'd recommend trying, and I may well try some more Koontz as a result of reading this. You can see more at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

P.S. - funny how the mind works. I was just loading the cover photo above and read the tag line as 'Elvis is real.' Sigh.

Seven steps to a better brainstorm

2012-01-20T09:29:00.000Z

All we need now is some brains

I was rather pleased to be interviewed the other day by CNN on the subject of brainstorming. It's one of those subjects that it's easy to mock, because it is often done so badly. It probably featured on The Office. Yet do it right and it's very powerful.

If you want to see brainstorming done badly, just watch an episode of The Apprentice. It's almost like they follow a rule book called 'How Not to Brainstorm' (or Brianstorm as I just typed). They sit round a whiteboard and think up ideas. Some get written down, some are ignored. Many will be argued with. And they end up with some fairly feeble ideas. And go with one. Not a great advert for the process.

If you are going to brainstorm I'd suggest seven steps for success:

Make sure you are addressing the right problem. Don't rush in and assume you know what it is you need to do. Quickly think through just what it is you are trying to achieve and see if their are alternative problems to solve that would give a better solution.
Use a technique to generate ideas. When Alex Osborn devised brainstorming he never intended people just to sit down and wait for inspiration. Use a simple idea generation technique, like using a randomly selected picture to generate a string of associations, then apply each of those associations as a starting point to solving your problem. (If that description is too condensed, see the ebook below for more details.) That way you will come at things differently and are more likely to come up with fresh ideas. It's fine to use top-of-the-head ideas too, but they often won't be the best.
No negatives, no editing. All new ideas are easy to shoot down. Collect all ideas at this stage, however impractical. Make sure whoever is writing up captures everything - don't let them edit as they go. Stop anyone in their tracks if they try to criticize an idea.
Give it some structure. I like putting each idea on a Post-it note. That way, when you've collected them you can move them around and structure them, bringing similar ideas together etc. Alternatively capture the ideas on a mind map, preferably using software and projecting the result on a big screen so everyone can see - that way you can restructure easily.
Choose wisely. Don't select ideas on practicality, but rather on wow factor. It's much easier to take an exciting but impractical idea and make it practical than it is to take a practical but dull idea and give it appeal. Give everyone an imaginary £100 to vote with. They can put it all on their favourite idea, or split it as they like, but make sure they vote on appeal, not practicality. Be prepared to go back and develop more than one idea.
Improve the ideas. Once you've selected an idea, refine it. Identify the key good points. Then find the main things wrong with. Finally improve the idea to get rid of the bad points, but keep the good points in front of you as a reminder. It's very easy to lose these as you fix the bad. Make sure your fixes don't wipe out the benefits.
Prepare for selling and implementation. It's very easy when you're all excited about an idea to rush out and tell everyone without thinking about practicalities. Make sure you know how you are going to sell your idea to anyone who has to give it the go-ahead, and have an outline of how you will implement it. That way you are much more likely to get it into practice.

It sounds a lot, but it's actually very simple - and makes all the difference. If you want to find out a bit more I have a free ebook Instant Brainstorming you can download here.

I don't believe it

2012-01-19T08:21:00.000Z

I was interested to see that loveable old grumpy Richard Wilson on TV the other night moaning about all the automated systems we have to deal with.

A lot of it was fair enough. I mean, who could love automated telephone menu systems? (Can anyone explain how on over 50% of the calls I make, whatever time of day, they appear to be experiencing higher than usual call volumes?) And I agree that those systems for paying for car parking by phone are a nightmare. But there was one thing they got wrong - and the way they went about it was very naughty.

Young Mr Wilson was moaning about supermarket self-checkouts. To try out (or rather to try to disprove) the claim that they are quicker to use, they took an immense sample of four people to compare self-checkout and going through a traditional till. And it was a fiasco of a test.

Firstly they compared the times for the two checkout processes from the point the checkout started. This misses the whole point, dumbos! When I go into the little Tesco which contains our Post Office, the manned checkout always has a queue of 3 to 4 people. At least one of the self checkouts is nearly always available. What you should compare is the time from entering the queue, not the time from starting checking out. Doh.

Secondly, they had suspiciously many problems with the self checkout. (I noticed one of the testers had actually put a piece of paper over the scanner and then spent ages wondered why it wouldn't scan.) I think the best of them had to be rescued by the operator about five times. Now I use a self checkout most days. And I'd say over half the times there are no interventions, and the rest there is usually one or two. I don't think I've ever had five. It was just ludicrous.

So Channel 4, by all means attack the irritating systems that give no benefit - but do it in a fair way. This was very naughty indeed.

When does a gift become a bribe?

2012-01-18T08:34:00.000Z

A product I've never reviewed

The other day I got an email from a PR agency that was more like the sort of scam that originates from Nigeria. The email (I won't name the agency to spare their blushes) said:

I’m updating the finance database to ensure any future payments will not be delayed. Could you provide me your banking details, please?

Although I've had information from this agency plenty of times, I've never done any work for them. Scamming apart, my immediate thought when putting 'PR agency' alongside 'payment' was around the area of bribery. It wouldn't surprise me if those who read reviews suspect that reviewers are being given lots of goodies, if not downright cash payments, to write good things.

Now I've been writing reviews since the 1990s - it's how I started in professional writing - and I have to say that, on the whole it is all squeaky clean and above board. If the product has a low production cost (software, for example, only has the incremental cost of the medium it is distributed on), then chances are you will be allowed to keep it. And I admit this used to be quite good when I was reviewing business software costing £200 a pop. But in my experience hardware manfacturers hardly ever let you keep anything. Even getting your hands on a review product can be quite difficult, and then it's only for a limited time period.

Similarly I've never been sent nice Christmas presents by PR companies or manufacturers. (Hint.) Not that it would make any difference. It's true that when I did a lot of IT journalism, we often got given some goodies for attending a product launch or briefing (I still use my Windows 95 bag), but this seemed much more a thank-you for your time, rather than anything to influence what you wrote.

I'm not saying it never happens. When I was reviewing business software I did get one blatent attempt at bribery. Someone from a PR agency (I genuinely can't remember which) rang and said that they would like me to write an open review of a new product (i.e. not for a specific magazine) and as long as I made sure it was very positive they would pay me a four figure sum. I told the PR where to stick it, and he sounded genuinely offended and shocked that I would turn down what could only be seen as a bribe. He didn't quite say 'You'll never work in this business again,' but there was a hint of it.

That, though, was a one-off with what I assume was a bad penny. On the whole the only inducement to write something nice is the urge to please the nice PR people (or in the case of a book, the author). So I'm sure that the PR agency asking for my bank details wasn't intending to slip me a little something. Professional reviews are, on the whole, pretty upright things in the UK - and that can't be bad.

The mysteries of technology

2012-01-17T10:50:00.000Z

As you may have gathered by now, I rather love my iPad and use it all the time. When, for example, I get sent proofs of my books to check through as PDFs, I tend to fling them over to the iPad and read them on there, as I find it much easier to read a document that way than on a computer screen. But the only danger is that you are at the mercy of the quality of the software interpreting the PDFs, which don't have as straightforward a file format as an image file. I discovered this recently when I was looking at the proof of a page from an illustrated book I've got out later this year. Part of one of the pages looked like this:

You can see there's a statue of Galileo to the left and to the right, bleeding across to the next page is a strange bit of hieroglyphics like something out of the Da Vinci Code. Very nice, I thought, but what does it mean?

So I sent a note to the editor, who came back swiftly, something to the effect of 'Isn't it obvious? It's Galileo's signature.' Well no, it wasn't obvious. But then I was struck with one of those IT inspirations. I thought I'd take a look at the same PDF on my computer. And this time, this is what I saw:

Now this is exactly the same file. All that I have changed is the device I'm looking at it with (and hence the software interpreting the PDF).

I'll continue to use the iPad to read PDFs as it is so much better an experience than doing it on a conventional screen. But in future, if anything looks strange, my first port of call will be to check what it looks like back on the old dinosaur machine.

At last I get rap

2012-01-16T08:05:00.000Z

The other day I was listening to a bit of hard core, or possibly thrash metal, the way you do. At least, the way you do if your children insist on listening to Radio 1 sometime around midnight when you pick them up, even if they can't stand the music. And I had a bit of an epiphany.

For a long time I have struggled to articulate why I dislike rap so much - and hearing this stuff made me realize what the answer is. I didn't enjoy the hardcore/thrash sounds that were coming from the car speakers. It really wasn't my kind of thing. The closest you'll find on my iPod is somewhere between Van der Graaf Generator and Pink Floyd at their most destructive. But I could appreciate what I was hearing as music. It clearly was someone producing music, and what they were doing had obvious antecedents in the musical tradition.

What I hear when I listen to a rap 'song' has a totally different antecedent. Where those extreme forms of rock grew from heavy metal, which came out of mainstream rock, rap clearly came out of a child, standing on a kitchen table showing off. Saying 'Hey, this is me! Aren't I clever with all these words I can say? Look at me! This is my name. Aren't I great?'

The reason I've never understood rap is that I was thinking of it as music, rather than simply childish showing off. Silly me. Now I get it.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

2012-01-13T09:30:00.000Z

With permission of the Institute of Physics

The seventeenth century physicist Robert Hooke has had something of a roller coaster ride of a history.

Although Hookes' law on the elasticity of springs has kept his name visible, he largely disappeared as a person in the glare of the spotlight placed on his indubitably great contemporary and rival Isaac Newton.

When Hooke re-emerged onto the world stage it became briefly fashionable to belittle Newton and big up Hooke's achievements. Now we have mostly got more of a balance. Hooke did do a remarkable amount in his own right. Yet the feud between Hooke and Newton was certainly not one-sided. In fact it started when Hooke dismissed Newton's paper on light and colour without even bothering to read it. And there is good evidence that Hooke had a tendency to claim other people's ideas as his own.

But there is no doubt that Hooke was a great experimenter, science populariser (his book of drawings of microscopic views is still stunning) and had some theoretical ideas that helped Newton immensely. For instance Hooke suggested using a pendulum to measure the acceleration due to gravity. And it was Hooke who realized that an object in orbit is freely falling towards the body it orbits, while at the same time moving sideways at the right speed to keep missing it. We know that Newton got this idea from Hooke because he wrote to Hooke that he had never heard of this hypothesis before. When the Principia was published, Hooke claimed that Newton had stolen his ideas, yet in letters between the two, it seems that Hooke had got as far as he could manage and was encouraging Newton to take his ideas further – something Newton certainly would.

Now the Insitute of Physics is celebrating Hooke's achievements in the rather imposing painting pictured here. It's an impressive work of imagination. Apparently the only known portrait of Hooke was destroyed in the early 1700s (possibly at Newton's instructions), so this image can only go on descriptions. We know Hooke had something of a hunched back and (in part as a result) did not come across as a particularly large man. It seems likely that when Newton quoted the remark in a letter to Hooke that if he had seen further it was by standing on the shoulders of giants, it was a bit of a dig, as Hooke was anything but a giant physically.

It's probably also worth saying that the artist, Rita Greer buys into the now largely discredited extreme view that Hooke's genius remains a surpressed fact thanks to Newton's hatred of him. She comments 'Robert Hooke, brilliant, ingenious seventeenth century scientist was brushed under the carpet of history by Sir Isaac Newton and his cronies. When he had his Tercentenary there wasn't a single memorial to him anywhere. I thought it disgraceful as Hooke did many wonderful things for science.' Note the emotive word 'cronies'.

But even though it's certainly not true that Hooke is regarded in a lowly fashion any more, it doesn't do us any harm to be reminded of this remarkable man. I find the idea of this being a portrait of Hooke when we don't really know what he looked like rather odd. It clearly isn't a portrait. But it is a powerful image to make us think about Hooke's achievements, and as such should be celebrated.

The portrait was hung yesterday at the Institute of Physics in London.

Food of the gods

2012-01-12T08:07:00.000Z

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again.

What can you say about a substance that brings us back time and again to a favourite treat, but is poisonous to dogs? We're talking theobromine (literally food of the gods from the Greek), the main active ingredient in chocolate. In fact this close relative of caffeine is poisonous to all mammals to some degree - us included - but you would have to eat a very large amount to suffer. Cats are even more susceptible... but they don't have a sweet receptor among their taste buds, so don't care much. Take a listen and find out more.

Those eureka moments

2012-01-11T09:50:00.000Z

The original Apple Computer logo

Historians of science tend to downplay 'eureka moments' when a scientist suddenly has a great idea. 'Constructed after the fact,' they mumble into their beards. 'Real science isn't like that. It's a slow grind, a team effort. Fake memories. Blah, blah...' Arguably this says more about historians of science, and their lack of imagination, than real scientists. For while all eureka moments are certainly not true, I think many are.

To dismiss a couple of unlikely ones, I very much doubt that the original Archimedes jumping out of the bath story has any validity. And there's good evidence that Galileo didn't get a sudden understanding of gravitational pull while dropping balls of different weights off the leaning tower of Pisa. (The evidence for this is that Galileo never mentions it. It is only told by an assistant who was writing about Galileo near the great man's death. But Galileo was a superb self-publicist. If he had done it, he would have bragged about it.)

However I'd also like put forward a classic that I feel probably is true. Newton and the apple. I'm not saying that an apple hit him on the head - that is pure fiction - but I don't think it's at all unreasonable that seeing an apple fall sparked a chain of thought. Here's Newton's own words on the subject, related by the historian William Stukeley:

After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, and drank thea [sic] under the shade of some apple trees; only he and myself. Amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood.

The fact is that there is strong evidence that humans tend to come up with their best ideas when they are not sitting at their desk trying to work, but rather when they are only half conscious of what they are dealing with. Perhaps on a walk (I get most of my ideas walking the dog), driving, or in Newton's case, sitting relaxing. It feels right. So hands off, historians of science. Even if it wasn't true, this kind of story is useful as myth - but in this case there is every possibility that it was.

Image from Wikipedia

Just go away

2012-01-10T10:05:00.000Z

Two words. Scottish independence. Please.

I'm sorry, I have no interest in keeping the Scots in the Union. The sooner they break off the better. Just think about it. No more Alex Salmond on UK television. It's worth it for that alone. No more Scottish MPs at Westminster. (It would be interesting if we had as few MPs of Scottish origin as they have MPs of English origin in the Scottish parliament. BTW, isn't Cameron a Scottish name?)

No more subsidies. No more need to fund postmen and medics and other vital services to go all the way to the Highlands and Islands. No more whingeing from Scottish politicians. (Actually there would be plenty of it, but hopefully it wouldn't make it onto our news.) Of course we'd lose out on North Sea Oil revenues - but it would be worth it. As would the mangling of the Union flag.

But please make it all or nothing. Any further devolution is no help. We'd STILL have all the whingeing. Still have their MPs at Westminster. And still see Alex Salmond.

It worked with the Americans. We've got on well with them (on the whole) since we've split. Please, let's have Scottish independence, sooner rather than later.

I talks detox

2012-01-09T10:28:00.000Z

I'm writing this quickly before heading off to BBC Wiltshire to talk detox. They thought this would be rather a fun thing to discuss post Christmas and the New Year, and I'm delighted to oblige.

Detox is one of those subjects that really gets me irritated at the way manufacturers and health shops rip people off. As usually presented, detox is total rubbish.

Let's break it down. What does detox mean? Removal of toxins - poisons - from the body. What are poisons? Pretty well anything taken in excess of an acceptable dose. Water, for example, is poisonous if you drink enough quickly. A couple of athletes have died as a result of water poisoning. (I think it dilutes your electrolyte levels sufficiently that your nervous system packs in.) Your body has brilliant systems for removing toxins - your liver and kidneys, for example - but if you shove too much in, it will have trouble getting rid of the bad stuff fast enough.

So what should you do to detox? It's so boring, which is why they make up all this garbage to sell products. All you need to do is cut down on the crap you shove in your mouth. Less fat, less sugar, more fruit (but not too much as that has a lot of sugar in it) and definitely more veg. A touch of exercise. And you've got detox perfected. Resultant expenditure - probably negative after cutting down on fatty and salty treats.

I was trying to look up the most infamous detox offender, Prince Charles' Duchy Herbals 'Detox Tincture' as an example, but they've gone all coy about it. The Duchy web page still tells us that for a mere £10 we can buy a little bottle, and that

Duchy Herbals Detox Tincture has been produced to help support the body's natural elimination and detoxification processes. It includes extracts of Dandelion and Artichoke, the latter of which is a well-known digestive aid, making it the ideal product to help kick-start your body after the festive period!

But if you click the link to the Detox Tincture page, you get take to page still called 'http://www.duchyoriginals.com/detox_tincture.php' but that tells you about sheep shearing. Hmm. Maybe Prince Charles doesn't want to fleece us any more.

A toy to conjure with

2012-01-06T09:37:00.001Z

When I was young I had an educational toy that was called something like an Electrokit (definintely not the Meccano Electrikit). It was a set of electronic components, each protected in a chunky housing with standard split-pin plug fittings at the bottom. You then got a series of circuit boards with appropriate sockets in and you could plug the transitors, resistors etc. in place to make up real working electronic devices.

I can't find a picture of the kit or the door, so here's
the Science Museum

As far as I can remember, and I'm really dredging the depths of memory here, it was brilliant. I feel a real nostalgia for this kit. The ultimate thing you could construct was a radio, which was quite exciting, but for me this wasn't anywhere near as good as another project. The thing is, a radio was an everyday item, but you also got the chance to build something cool of practically Star Trek wonder.

Before I reveal what this project was, I ought to point out something I have since shown to my children at the Science Museum in London. I don't know if it's still there, but last time I went round this particular part of the mueseum I spotted an antique exhibit of an automatic opening door. The first time I went to the Science Museum, aged 6, this door with an 'electric eye' was absolutely mind boggling. You walked up to it, and it opened. Automatically. Like magic. I must have gone through it about a dozen times. This was the future. Really.

So given this context, here's my favourite project with that home kit. As well as the basic electronic circuitry you added a buzzer (and possibly a light) and a pair of wires. At the end of the wires was a little panel with a series of conducting bars. This panel broke the circuit - the buzzer didn't go off. But if the panel got wet, the water conducted electricity across the bars and the buzzer sounded, controlled by a transitor on the board.

So what you could do, for example, is tape the sensor to the side of the bath and leave it filling, careless not bothering to watch it. Surely it would overflow, causing terror and destruction? No! The amazing technology started to buzz and you could turn off the taps. Ah, joy, pure joy. This was twenty-first century living in the 1960s.

Picture from Wikipedia

Trying not to be Prejudiced

2012-01-05T08:34:00.000Z

I'm a great fan of Jane Austen, and love a good detective story, so was delighted to get the P. D. James follow-up to Pride and Prejudice, the murder mystery Death Comes to Pemberley for Christmas.

It was quite eerie to start reading it, as I had watched the film adaptation of P and P with Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet just the evening before. It somehow made it particularly easy to immerse myself in the book - and I ought to stress that I'm not a picky traditionalist, so was not in any sense worried about what Ms James would do to the hallowed characters. (As credentials, I love Stephen Moffatt's modern day Sherlock).

Sadly, though, I can only be lukewarm about what I read. If I'm honest, P. D. James is not one of my favourite writers - I find her usual murder mysteries rather stiff and stilted. (In fact the best thing about the Dalgleish stories is the superb theme tune of the TV adaptation.) Although the Austen sequel is cleverly written, it seemed to lack that immense warm humour that is the absolute essence of Jane Austen. Elizabeth is little more than a bit part, rather than the central character. And at least once the author seemed to be using the book as a vehicle for her politics, when bizarrely the characters suddenly start discussing whether there ought to be a right of appeal in a trial (not available at the time), and how this would be absurd as it 'could presumably result in a foreign court trying English cases. And that would be the end of more than our legal system.' Presumably a pointed reference to European interference in UK justice.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad book. I was interested to read it to the end and enjoyed it. But I simply felt it lacked the energy and brilliance of an Austen, while it was too slow to develop to work as a murder mystery. Still, worth taking a look at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

To cheer you up a bit, here is that excellent theme music:

The fight against racism must go on

2012-01-04T08:43:00.000Z

Amidst the floods of coverage of the recent successful trial of two of the attackers of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, a crime committed 18 years ago, there have inevitably been a matching set of articles, TV and radio pieces on the nature of racism.

I read an article that seemed shocked that there was still racism in schools after all this time. To be shocked about this is to have a very poor understanding of human beings. The fact is we are naturally disposed to distrust, and at the extreme to hate, those who are different, whether based on race, religion, appearance (red hair, for instance), accent - pretty well anything. If we can't find anyone who is different enough, we will set up an arbitrary difference, which to an outsider looks pathetic.

In olden days, when few travelled far enough to know anyone really different, English people looking down on the Irish, those from Lancashire and Yorkshire hated each others guts (despite being almost indistinguishable to outsiders), and if all that failed, most places had a local town which historically was regarded as being in some ways different or backwards, so providing the alien to shun or attack. Where I came from it was a town called Heywood. Although this 'localism' had pretty well died out by my time, a hammer was still jokingly referred to as a 'Heywood screwdriver.'

In a primitive, dangerous tribal environment, any and every stranger, anyone who is different, even if they are just from the next town, is a potential threat. Thankfully we have moved on. But just as our bodies are still functioning as if we lived on the diet of 100,000 years ago, so our brains still have this inbuilt fear and distrust of the alien. You can't turn it off in a generation, or ten generations. It will take much longer. We have pushed out our boundaries, but we still automatically find an alien somewhere.

You may say 'But many of my friends are from different races, creeds, appearances, class etc.' This misses the point. Once you get to know a person, that individual is no longer 'them'. The British class system survived so long because there were institutions in place to ensure that you didn't have to mingle with 'them', so plenty still remained alien. But the ability to shift an individual from 'them' to 'us' (probably developed because the early tribes tended to ensure genetic variation by stealing mates from other villages) doesn't mean the fundamental fear and distrust of the alien isn't still there. We all have it. So have our children, and so will many generations to come.

The fight against racism - and all the other -isms is not over. Our current enlightened view (not shared by the whole world, let's face it) is a triumph of mind over nature. We need to sustain this mental battle indefinitely. It's incredibly naive to think it has gone away and we can sit on our laurels. We need to keep up the steady pressure for the long haul.

I'm back - paper back

2012-01-03T09:28:00.000Z

Ok, that title I'm back - paper back didn't really work as a pastiche of James Bond introducing himself. But I am delighted to be starting the new year in the way I hope to be going on with montonous regularity, with a new book out - to be precise the paperback version of Inflight Science.

If you are wise, attractive and generally wonderful enough to have already acquired a copy of Inflight Science you may be puzzled and be saying 'But it was already a paperback'. This reflects the way the first edition was in a rather strange format called 'trade paperback' which is half way between a hardback and a paperback. (See this post for more info on the concept.) What has now come out is the mass market paperback version. This is smaller and cheaper than the original - so even handier to slip in that pocket prior to a flight.

Unfortunately the publishers in their wisdom (and I'm assured there is a good reason) have only brought this version out in the UK - so in the US there's only the trade version, which is also still available in the UK, as it's rather snazzier to buy as a present. However, the Amazon.com price is very good on the chunkier version, so it's not too much of an issue.

So there we have it. Even more choice of Inflight Science possibilities. Even more affordable. What's not to love? Check it's web page for more info.

Why are banks so stupid?

2012-01-02T11:13:00.000Z

A bank. As stupid as the rest, but at
least it looks interesting

I can't believe the stupidity of banks. I'm not referring to all the usual reasons for hating bankers (like their bonuses and breaking our economy) - but because their computer systems are so rubbish.

A lot of this stems from their philosophical inability to recognize weekends and bank holidays. 'What, us, work like normal people in a service industry? Do us a favour?' You might think they do work at the weekend. After all many banks are now 'open' on Saturdays. But that is just a shadow, a ghost of a bank, to fool you into thinking they care. All the transactions they make at the weekend or on bank holidays are saved up to go through on the next 'working day', because their computers don't believe it is really possible to work at the weekend.

Here's one ludicrous example. I have a standing order that goes out on the first of the month. If I go online today, 2 January, which this year is a bank holiday because New Year's Day is on a Sunday, and try to change this standing order I'm presented with the following conflicting information. When's the next upcoming payment? 1 January 2012 (as it won't be processed until the 3rd). Can I change the next transaction? No because you can't change a transaction in the past. But I want to change the next one. In the future. Argggh.

Picture from Wikipedia

What is job security?

2011-12-30T09:45:00.000Z

Umbrellas - not doing a lot of protecting

With all the sad news of job cuts and redundancies I feel a strange reversal of role coming over me.

When I left British Airways around 17 years ago to work for myself, lots of people said 'I couldn't do what you're doing. I'd love to be my own boss but I couldn't cope with the lack of job security.' It was a scary thought, coming out from under the protecting umbrella of an organization that paid your salary with satisfying regularity at the end of the month.

It's true that over the years there have been times when things have been very tight. There are no guarantees when you work for yourself. Your next bit of earnings won't just come drifting in, you've got to go out and find it. And yet the whole idea that I was doing something risky compared with those who stayed working for a company, or a public body, assumes that there is such a thing as a guarantee.

But now when I compare myself with someone who has been made redundant, I feel strangely secure. They suddenly have nothing come in. I don't doubt it's harder for me to get projects going at the moment, but on the whole I can find ways to keep going. In a sense I have more security because I can't be made redundant. There isn't a circumstance where I would have to start again from scratch. What a strange reversal.

Image from Wikipedia

Exceeding expectations

2011-12-29T09:13:00.000Z

If I'm brutally honest, I've never really understood the attraction of Dickens. Those of his books I've read have been overlong, often dull, filled with ridiculous character names and caricatures, and mawkish. But I have to confess I so far have found the latest TV adaptation of Great Expectations a delight.

This is not harmed by having the wonderful Gillian Anderson in the Miss Haversham part, which she endows with a wondrous mix of otherwordlyness and downright nuttery.

But it's more than that. The whole thing is both gripping and engaging. There's really only one truly silly Dickens character, the uncle with the stupid name. Bumblewick or some such gobbledygook.

So maybe I was a bit premature writing Dickens off. At least in TV adaptations.

Do we live a charmed life?

2011-12-28T12:10:00.000Z

I am puzzled by a statistical blip. Quite a high proportion of our children's friends have parents who have split up. Not that surprising you might say. Yet when I look at our own friends, none of our close friends, and only one or two friends in the 'go for a drink occasionally, but not what you'd really call mates' category are divorced. All the rest just got married and got on with it.

The last thing I want to do by saying this is jinx things, but luckily (?) I don't believe in such superstition, magpie greeting apart. It is quite interesting, though. Does it reflect the kind of friends we seek out, the circumstances in which we meet people, a statistical outrider or a whole combination thereof? Probably. Dunno. But it's interesting to think.

And finally, as they say on the news, I gather from the excellent Mark O'Donnell on our local radio that the chimpanzee that played Cheetah in the old black and white Johnny Weismuller films has died. He was 80. I don't know why, but that's something I find interesting too.

Ain't statistics wonderful?

In praise of girls and women

2011-12-27T11:33:00.000Z

Although the title of this post could be general, I had something specific in mind - cathedral choirs. This time of year we get more than usual exposure to cathedral choirs and their college equivalents, and they look as if they're preserved in aspic. But recently there has been a small revolution which I heartily welcome.

Traditionally such choirs have been all male, with boys taking the top treble part. There are choirs with women at a good few of the cathedrals, but they tend to be a separate, 'second league' choir. Some believe that boys and men provide the best sound there is. There's even an organization dedicated to preserving the traditional cathedral choir. But I think it's a load of tosh, which is why I very much welcome the fact we're seeing the occasional female singer joining first rank choirs.

What the anti-women brigade argue is that women's voices don't have the same clear purity as a boy's. And actually, on the whole this is true. In part this is because most good female singers will have been trained by a wannabe opera singer and will have had vibrato introduced, which is all wrong for a cathedral choir (take note, Oxford). And in part this is because women's voices do break, just less obviously than men's - and women don't have the same sound as boys (or girls).

However I think there are two ways we can and should see mixed choirs flourishing. One is that the boys should be joined by girls, with the same age limits. I defy anyone to do a blind test between well-trained boys and girls of the same age and tell which is which, as long as there is an age cutoff. Younger girls also have that clear purity. And the other aspect is that I think we are long overdue replacing male altos with women.

Cathedral choirs traditionally use male altos. I'm not biassed against them - I was one for a while. But their tone is very harsh. They work well in medieval music, but for practically everything else a female alto (provided she doesn't have too much vibrato) has a much better, blending tone. So I not only think we should allow women to sing alto, but we ought over time to replace all male altos. Sorry guys.

With these changes cathedral music would be significantly better. Then all we have to do is work on the FA/FIFA to allow football teams to be mixed...

I don't know much about art... but I ought to

2011-12-23T14:27:00.000Z


'LOOK WHAT THE DOG DID' Pixels on screen Brian Clegg - 2011

Although I earn my living as a writer I see this more as a craft than an art. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to the arts. Not that I don't appreciate music or painting - I just don't understand why it needs to be subsidised. But really when you look at the letters after my name, I ought to know what I'm on about.

I very rarely use these - who does these days? But technically my name should be followed by M.A., M.A., F.R.S.A. Three sets of letters - and every one of these has an 'A' for art.

In the first place I'm a Master of Arts in the original sense of being a 'magister artis'. There are those who moan about the fact that Oxford and Cambridge graduates only have to sit around for a few years and not go to gaol (I think the Oxford lot have to pay as well) to have their B.A. transform into an M.A. - but this misses the point. That's how it's meant to be. After all, these two establishments started the whole university business in the UK. A magister is someone who can teach - the idea is that after a few years you have gained the experience to be able to pass on the subject.

That first M.A. is in natural sciences. Why a master of arts for a science degree? Because 'art' didn't orginally mean just painting and such. It was the work of man as opposed to the work of God. So everything other than theology was arts. The second M.A. is in Operational Research, effectively applied maths. But at least it's a masters in the modern sense.

And then I'm a fellow of what many would call the Royal Society of Arts - but the clue as to why I'm there is the full title: The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Aha. Yes, I'm from the common end of the title.

So there you go. I may not know much about arts, but the letters after my name don't agree.

Colour me yellow

2011-12-22T09:20:00.000Z

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again.

I had quite a lot of fun with this one, which has had the biggest response on Twitter of any podcast I've done. It's about the dye tartrazine. Chemically it's one of the azo dyes, which are by far the most commonly used dyes, but of course it also has its controversy as a food colouring, which is why I got the Twitter flood.

Unfortunately, perhaps, the RSC did a slightly flippant tweet about it saying Tartrazine might send kids crazy, but it's definitely a pretty colour - now if you actually listen to the podcast I was a lot more measured about its potential effects, but this introduction was enough not only to get significantly retweeted but also to cause the wroth of one individual who posted 7 tweets mostly along the lines of 'Ever read Nerves In Collision by Walter C. Alvarez, M.D. about the many epilepsies?' Well no, Mr Wild (with excellent nominative determinism that really seems to be what he's called), I haven't.

I don't know about anyone else but as soon as someone puts 'M. D.' after the name on a book spine I think that they're either a boy called Doogie Howser or they are not exactly producing scientific fact. Sadly most of Mr Wild's academic references were to a Yahoo group, which doesn't exactly raise confidence either. I knew E numbers caused concern, but I hadn't realized how knee-jerk the reaction would be.

However, the mini-tweetstorm isn't the subject of this post, it's tartrazine - so why not take a listen and see if Mr Wild was right?

E books can get physical

2011-12-21T10:54:00.000Z

A book selling online recently

I see from a YouGov survey, via a report in the Bookseller than books - real, solid paper books - are 'among the most popular online buys.'

I must admit, I don't find the results of the survey particularly surprising. For example we are told that customers are 'likely to use a different retailer for electronic and bricks and mortar shopping' - well, yes. It's not exactly a surprise, for example, that a lot of people buy online from Amazon and don't on the high street for obvious reasons. (Amazon really ought to buy out Argos - it would be a great fit.) Similarly, my daughters buy quite a lot of clothes online from retailers like Urban Outfitters and Abercrombie & Fitch that don't have stores in our town, so it's not surprisingly that they rarely visit these shops in the brick and mortar form.

As an aside, just as the next generation has a different view of electronic communications to us oldies, they also buy remotely in a different way. If I buy stuff online, it's stuff I want. I may occasionally send it back if there's something wrong with it, but otherwise I keep it. They will buy a bunch of clothes with the intent of sending up to 50% of it back. They regard online shopping more as a visit to a changing room than a visit to the till. (In this regard, BOO HISS to Urban Outfitters, which is about the only online shop that doesn't pay the postage on returns. So guess which mug does.)

But my main theme was the observation that books are amongst the most popular online buys. This makes a lot of sense. I know it's lovely to browse through a bookshop and thumb through books (though it is less pleasant then buying some of those thumbed-through books - some of the stock on the shelves is in terrible condition). But a lot of book purchases are either a gift or another book from an author you already know and trust. It's an ideal type of product to buy online. (And it's the right shape to post.) And long may people continue to buy this way - as well as through traditional bookshops.

I love a good bookshop, but I'm not one of those book police types who think if you don't buy from their favourite little indie store you are a philistine. I just want people to buy books!

Christmas slow-down

2011-12-20T14:37:00.000Z

As happens every year, I'm afraid blog posting is going to get rather erratic over the next couple of weeks. Many apologies - but I will try to appear as often as time is available. The trouble is, with the dual requirements to

a) Rush around the house like mad clearing up because 'Someone* is coming round.' and

b) Indulge in far too much eating and drinking and watching TV that would be painful the rest of the year but is somehow right at the festive time

there really isn't enough time to blog as well.

So, in honour of my choir, which did an excellent job of the carol service on Sunday, I'll leave you with one of my favourite carols instead (this, incidentally isn't my choir):

* Not a euphemism for Santa Claus or Father Christmas. Just someone.

Science jokes bode well

2011-12-19T13:48:00.000Z

There's been quite a lot of physics in the news lately, what with the faster than light (ish) neutrinos and the possibility of a sighting of the Higgs boson (not to mention a rumoured sighting of Brian Cox). It's rather nice - it even makes up for the BBC's nautical version of the goings on at CERN, repeatedly calling the elusive particle a Higgs bosun. (It's named after a guy called Bose, folks. Get with the plot.)

A very welcome sign of the interface between physics and the real world are the physics jokes doing the rounds, no longer confined to geeks and nerds.

You will all have seen (ad nauseam) A barman says 'We'll have no faster than light particles in here.'
A neutrino walked into a bar.

... But how about (via Calum Scott) this?: Argon walked into a bar. The barman says 'We don't serve noble gasses.' Argon doesn't react..

And thanks to Mark O'Donnell at BBC Wiltshire for this cracker: A Higgs boson goes into a church on Christmas Eve but the vicar says: 'Sorry, we don't allow Higgs bosons into our service.' The Higgs boson replies: 'But how else are you going to have Mass?'

All in all excellent stuff, though I have to say there's a lot of exclusion going on in these jokes...

Off the shelf makes sense

2011-12-16T09:30:00.000Z

A shelf something could easily be got off

We hear in the news that our military has wasted around £1 billion failing to come up with an armoured vehicle so had to buy off the shelf. That piece instantly transported me back to my days at British Airways.

We got involved in an EU project to design a better check-in system. Great idea - check-in systems were incredibly fast, but had a terrible user interface. We went through months and thousands of pieces of paper in the set up process and finally got to the first real stage. And the Euro-powers-that-were told us the first thing we needed to do was design a computer terminal. From scratch. So that we had the best equipment for the job. We pulled out. If you want a way of interacting with a computer you grab a PC of the shelf. To design such hardware from scratch was ludicrous.

Firstly it would have been extremely expensive. I think the cost per unit was four or five times that of an off-the-shelf PC. Secondly all this time, effort and money could at best produce maybe a five percent enhancement in terms of matching our exact requirements. And most important of all, that 'at best' was never going to happen. The fact is that after years of deliberation by committee we would end up with a worst of all worlds device that was worse than the PC was back when we first started, let alone today's model.

Of course there are circumstances when off-the-shelf isn't the answer. But my experience with BA and other organizations (particularly public ones, or ex-public ones) is that many people have a ridiculously strong urge to build something bespoke that provides nowhere near the benefits that would be needed to outweigh the vast increase in cost over off-the-shelf. It wastes time, it wastes effort and very often you end up with something worse. My suspicion is that this is true of most MoD purchasing.

Now, time for my cup of coffee. Should I use an off-the-shelf kettle, or design something myself that will end up taking three months to build, will cost £527.47 and will start leaking after two weeks use. Hmm. Difficult one. Better get a committee together...

Get drawn into a book

2011-12-15T08:40:00.000Z

Another of the books in the series

We all like the feeling of being immersed in a book that we're reading. You could say that you get drawn into the book. Now there's a chance to have this happen literally.

It's a rather fun idea from my UK publisher Icon. They produce the pocket-sized 'Introducing, a graphic guide' books, which combine punchy text with artist-created illustrations. You can see the kind of thing in this sneak peak of Introducing Relativity, though I have to say that the illustrations in the new book are much crisper and better drawn than these appear to be in the sample. Icon is running a competition to get a cameo role by being drawn in a new book by a well known popular science author (ahem), Introducing Infinity. So the winner will have themselves drawn as one of the figures in an image illustrating one of the pages.

To enter all you have to do is summarize a topic that the Introducing series covers in 100 characters in a tweet which contains both the hashtag #beinabook and the link http://tinyurl.com/bpal8od (that's just a link to their competition page). Simples, as all the best meerkats say. The closing date is 5pm GMT on Thursday 5th January 2012. The winner (judged most amusing and accurate by Icon Editorial Director Duncan Heath and me - sadly bribes are not allowed) appears in the book, while the 25 runners up get a free copy of an Introducing book.

That should be enough to enter, but to find out more see Icon's page on the competition, and to see the range of topics, here's a list of their books.

Turner tat

2011-12-14T08:32:00.000Z

They thought if they did it in Gateshead no one would notice

Last week was Turner Prize time again (sorry for the delay in commenting on this, but another artform, Playboy, seems to have got in the way). Yes, it was that annual opportunity for those who have the suspicion that much of the arts is pretentious claptrap to have a field day.

The slightly surprising discovery was that I really liked Martin Boyce's winning exhibit Do Words Have Voices. Admittedly I haven't seen it for real, but from what I've seen in photos/ on the TV it is very impressive, and certainly no pile of bricks or dirty bed.

However the arts community can't yet emerge from its bunker grinning with relief. ('I say, Brian Clegg liked it. Can you believe it? Now we can have a happy Christmas!') Because I still heard a load of posing garbage spouted about it on the TV and radio.

What particularly got me was the way the arty types were saying of various entries (including the winner) 'Of course, only those in the know will appreciate this.' Apparently you have to be one of the cognoscenti to get anything out of these 'art works' because understanding them is all about spotting subtle references. If that is true, then what we are dealing with is not art, it's an in-joke. The whole point of art is to communicate. If the art doesn't do that unless you get the in-jokes, it's crap art. End of.

Picture from Wikipedia

My photo is in Playboy

2011-12-13T08:28:00.000Z

Don't get too excited now, but my photograph has appeared in Playboy magazine. (December issue if you're interested.) Here it is:

Okay, not necessarily what you were thinking of, but that's definitely my photo and you can take my word for it that it's a cutting from Playboy, specifically the edition shown here.

I must confess that I have never bought a copy of Playboy (no, honestly), so I was always very dubious about those people who claimed that they only bought it for the articles - but I must admit there was a lot more text in it than there were dubious photographs (and they were relatively tasteful). And, of course, all the great writers had pieces published in this august journal.

As the 'playbill' intro suggests, what is featured is a piece adapted from How to Build a Time Machine, so if you're a regular Playboy reader (for the articles, of course), you can get a bit of a preview of some of the material on offer. They've done quite a dramatic job with the opening spread, as you'll see with part of it below (though the real thing looks more impressive). I don't know if they have different versions of the magazine worldwide, but it's certainly in the US edition.

Goodbye Mr Higgs

2011-12-12T08:04:00.000Z

The only Higgs definitely spotted

Or not. There have been a lot of rumours flying around the physics world as to whether or not the latest batch of info from CERN, released tomorrow, would include a sighting of the infamous Higgs boson. Frankly, as rumours go they don't have the same bite as a good sex scandal, but, hey, this science.

The search for the Higgs is, of course, one of the main justifications for building the LHC. This is a hypothetical particle that may be responsible for giving some of the other particles their mass. But something that the newspapers don't seem to grasp is that the LHC would be just as much a success if it showed that the Higgs doesn't exist. Personally, I'd prefer it if it doesn't.

There are bits of physics which have a kind of neat, natural simplicity. This doesn't necessarily mean that the maths is simple. I would include the notoriously tricksy general relativity in this class. But quite a lot of the more recent physics depends very heavily on complex, intertwined sets of mathematical conjecture - and I really don't like that. My not liking it doesn't make it wrong, but I would prefer it if the whole tangled structure was brought crashing down and someone came up with a more satisfying solution.

So part of me will be happy if the Higgs gets pinned down, because at least we will be making progress - but that happiness will be accompanied by a deep sigh. Because the alternative, whatever it turns out to be, could be more exciting - and much more approachable. Is that irrational? Quite possibly. But it doesn't stop me hoping that they don't find the Higgs boson.

Image from Wikipedia

Reach for the aqua fortis

2011-12-09T08:26:00.000Z

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again.

Although chemists can devise some impressively catchy names –‘photon’, for example was coined by the chemist Gilbert Lewis – the standard naming conventions of chemistry can be a little dull. Nitric acid seems an uninspiring name for such a powerful compound. The old name ‘aqua fortis’ – literally strong water – has a much more appealing ring to it. Have a listen to find out more about this hugely important industrial compound.

Back to the Future

2011-12-08T09:14:00.000Z

I know I've mentioned it a bit already, but I'm delighted to say that my latest book, How to Build a Time Machine is now published in the US and available in all good book stores/online. You can read more about it/buy a copy if so inclined at its web page. It also has a Facebook page for those interested/who want to discuss it and the physics of time travel.

Until recently, travelling through time seemed little more than fantasy. But quantum theory and particularly relativity open up ways to make time travel possible - and I still find it remarkable that no physical law prevents it.

How to Build a Time Machine explores our best understanding of time but really concentrates on how to manipulate it. There's the story of a time traveller's convention where no one turned up, and a tour through the remarkable possibilities of real time travel that emerge from quantum entanglement, superluminal speeds, neutron star cylinders and wormholes in space. There's even a physics professor who believes it's possible to build a working general relativity time machine on the desktop. I think it's just a fascinating subject.

If anyone in the UK fancies a copy, I'm afraid it doesn't come out here until January (as Build Your Own Time Machine) - but it can already be pre-ordered from Amazon, via the book's web page.

It's a bit soon for reviews (except those sent through a time machine), but here's a couple of early comments:

Brian Clegg conjectures on the world of time and space travel and brings it all beautifully down to earth. Brilliant. - Johnny Ball

A solid overview of some of the quirkier corners of physics, with an entertaining connection to pop culture. - Kirkus Reviews

Spot on Monbiot

2011-12-07T08:27:00.000Z

If I'm honest,George Monbiot has not always been my favourite environmental writer. Sometimes in the past he has come across as po-faced and impractical in his ideas. But I wholeheartedly support his Guardian article on Tuesday supporting nuclear energy.

He points out the vast damage the anti-nuclear lobby is doing to the environment. How, for example, the knee-jerk panic of the Germans shutting down their nuclear programme will result in an extra 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere between now and 2020 alone.

He is also brave to point out at least two significant examples of totally spurious information being used to bolster the anti-nuclear cause. One is from an individual selling 'anti-radiation' pills whose claims have been exposed as false, yet whose 'findings' are widely used by anti-nuclear protestors. Another is the ludicrous statistics from Chernobyl, again brandished by the campaigners, claiming amongst other things that deaths from cirrhosis of the liver were caused by the nuclear accident. I was a trustee of a charity working in Belarus, and I can assure you that a much more obvious cause is by far the biggest medical threat there, not radiation.

I love the way Monbiot aligns anti-nuclear protestors with supporters of homeopathy and anti-vaccine campaigners. When misused it's exactly the same kind of dangerous woo. Great stuff, George.

He finishes with details of a fantastic sounding reactor that can produce energy safely and in large quantities from nuclear waste. While I can't believe it's quite the no-brainier he suggests, it sounds amazing. My suspicion is that it will be expensive, as otherwise the government would be biting people's hands off to get it. Yet it certainly sounds the way forward.

It's too soon

2011-12-06T08:30:00.000Z

A Christmas tree (not this year) plus reindeer substitute

I can't say I'm overwhelmed by the way people seem to be decorating their houses earlier and earlier for Christmas. I must admit I'm extreme. Given a free hand I wouldn't put anything up until a week before, but I have to give way to family pressure and go for a fortnight before. However I was quite surprised how many Christmas decorations I saw on houses in November.

Days-to-Christmas-ometer

It's not that I'm against Christmas jolity. And I must admit our days-to-Christmas-ometer does go up at the start of December. But I think there are good arguments for not decorating too early:

If you do, you've given in to the shopkeepers. There was a time when no one would have decorations up this early. But as shops have pushed back the point they go into Christmas mode sooner and sooner, so houses have started to get their fairy lights out of the loft at an earlier date. I think we should stand up for our right not to be hustled into Christmas decor too soon.
If you have a real tree it will be looking pretty sad by Christmas Day. This is, after all, the start of Christmas, and more to the point, the day when you are likely to spend more time in proximity to your Christmas tree than any other. Remember it has to last another 12 days after this. Get it at the start of December and it will be balding by Christmas Day.
You can only sustain so much 'specialness'. If the decorations are up all through December they have become everday by the 25th. The whole point is to make Christmas special, but there's a real danger it just becomes part of the wallpaper.

So give it a thought. Let's have a campaign for a real Christmas and not an extended retail period.

Strangely pleasant

2011-12-05T08:11:00.000Z

Now here's a challenge. I quite often write a bit of a blog post when an idea occurs to me, then fill it in later. Thanks to Blogger's mobile app, I can do this anywhere, tapping it in on my phone. So I'll write a title and a couple of lines of text that summarize the idea, then fill in the details later.

This particular post started that way, but with a difference. All I wrote was the title. And I can't for the life of me remember what it was supposed to be about.

It certainly wasn't about the sensation you get when you pull a piece of dry skin off yourself, though I do find this strangely pleasant. (I still remember when, age 10, I broke my arm and after the plaster came off the entire arm was covered in dry skin. Heaven.)

Nor was it about the slightly related pleasure that comes from an unopened jar of instant coffee. You take off the lid and there underneath is that pristine seal, waiting to be broken through. For some reason I remember discussing this with someone I used to work with at British Airways (I don't suppose you remember, Sue), well over 20 years ago. We both agreed about the pleasure, but then discovered it was from a totally different action. Mine was to run the end of a spoon around the edge, crisply slitting it open. Hers was to attack it with a spoon, bashing dramatically through. (Freudians have a field day. But remember psychoanalysis has no scientific basis.)

So what did it concern? Junk food? The peace that sometimes unexpectedly turns up during the day? Cadbury's Whole Nut? I really have no idea. Perhaps you have some thoughts...

Some different Christmas music

2011-12-02T09:58:00.000Z

It's that time of year when, should you venture into a shopping mall or supermarket, you will be bombarded with Christmas music. Similarly the radio stations be increasingly groaning with Christmas tunes. Now, I like Christmas music. And I can't be humbuggy enough to point out that it's currently Advent, and Christmas doesn't start until December 25th. For some reason, Christmas music is all about anticipation. But I just wish they pumped out a bit more variety.

There are about 10 Christmas carols and 10 Christmas songs (please, not Slade!) that will get circulated over and over again. But it really doesn't have to be like this. I try to buy myself a new CD of Christmas carols every year, and this year went for this one - Fear and Rejoice, O People. It's mostly quite modern stuff (in the sense of post 1900), but nothing too weird.

There's a good mix of really top notch numbers, from the moving Howells Sing Lullaby that opens the disc to Tavener's hypnotic A Hymn to the Mother of God at the end. Generally the performances from St John's College Cambridge under Christopher Robinson are excellent, though the solo trebles are perhaps lacking in a little welly. The inevitable Rutter is one of his most subtle, There is a flower. There are two of Robinson's own carols - I preferred his traditional Hereford Carol, though Fear and Rejoice is interesting. Two lesser known treats are Geraint Lewis's Howells-like A little hymn to Mary and Arthur Oldham's Remember, O thou man, which has become one of my favourite choir carols since singing it at the Oxford University Physics Department Carol Service a couple of years ago.

Overall I really liked it. You can hear samples of the tracks at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. If you want to stretch your Christmas music experience there's a whole range of recommended CDs here, from traditional carols to quite challenging modern stuff.

Flipping coins!

2011-12-01T09:07:00.000Z

Thanks to Peet Morris for this excellent example of probability running counter to common sense.

Imagine I have a huge stack of coins and flip them one after another. These are fair coins, with a 50:50 chance of coming up heads or tails.

First of all I flip the coins one after another (leaving the flipped coins on the table) until the sequence H T H comes up. At that point I stop and count the coins. Then I repeat this experiment many times.

For the second part I again flip the coins, leaving them on the table, until the sequence H T T comes up. At that point I stop and count the coins. Then I repeat the experiment many times.

On average would you expect it to take more flips to produce H T H, more flips to produce H T T or the same number of flips?

Common sense says this is pretty obvious. It's the same number of flips. And certainly if I take three coins and flip them, there's the same chance of H T H or H T T coming up. But, remarkably, things are different in the experiment above. On average you will take fewer flips to produce H T T than you would to to produce H T H.

Just take a moment to think how that might be possible.

Here's the sneaky probabalistic component that isn't obvious: in both cases, you need the sequence H T to come up first. Now imagine that you then get the wrong face on the next flip. So if you were looking for H T H you actually get H T T and vice versa. With this starting point, H T T has an advantage. If you were looking for H T T, and actually got H T H, then the last coin in the sequence is H. So you only need T T to complete your sequence. If you were looking for H T H and actually got H T T, then the last coin the sequence is T, so you need all three of H T H to complete the sequence.

The reason H T T does better is that the sequence of faces that isn't correct ends in the face that starts your sequence. For H T H, the wrong result produces a bad starting point, so you have to run the exercise that bit longer.

Relativity can be riveting

2011-11-30T08:32:00.000Z

Looking back a long (long) way to my physics degree, special relativity was one of my favourite subjects. It's weird and wonderful enough to be amazing, but (unlike general relativity) the maths is relatively easy. Don't worry though, I'm not going to throw equations at you - I just wanted to share one of the remarkable paradoxes of relativity.

I've seen paradoxes defined as contradictions that can't be true, but I think a much more appropriate definition for physics is situations that appear to involve a mind-boggling contradiction, that the physics tells us really is the way things are. And special relativity is full of them.

This particular one below I hadn't seen before, and I picked up from Andrew Stearne's book The Wonderful World of Relativity. (This sounds like a children's book, but actually it's a relativity primer that is probably best appreciated by those about to start a physics course at university, as it's a bit too textbooky for the general reader.)

Here's the scenario. We've got a table with a 10mm deep hole in it. At the bottom of the hole a beetle is happily beetling about, unaware that we are about to fire a rivet into the hole. The good news is that the shank of the rivet, the bit that will go into the hole, is only 8mm long, leaving room for our (rather small) beetle to feel safe and snug.

Unfortunately, though, the rivet is fired towards the table at a fair percentage of the speed of light. It's somewhat typical of this book that all it tells us about the speed is that γ is 2, which doesn't really give you an idea of how fast the rivet is going, but if my back of an envelope calculations are right, this is around 0.87 times the speed of light. Quite a fast rivet, then.

Now one of the weird effects of special relativity is that an object moving at high speed is squashed up in the direction of travel as seen by an observer. So from the bug's viewpoint the rivet won't by 8mm long, it will be just 5mm long. 'Wow,' thinks the bug, 'what was I worried about?' But before it sits back and starts reading the newspaper, there's something it needs to consider. Relativity works both ways. From the rivet's viewpoint, it's not the rivet that's moving, it's the table. This means from the rivet's view it remains 8mm long - but the hole is contracted and is now only 5mm deep. Squish goes bug.

So what really happens? (I use 'really' loosely. Let's face it, Wickes does not sell a 0.87 times the speed of light rivet gun.) Is the beetle somehow both live and dead, in the manner of the famous quantum cat? Sadly no. It's squish all the way.

Let's follow the event from the beetle's viewpoint. Down comes the rivet and slams into the table. At the moment before the impact the rivet is still just 5mm long as far as the bug is concerned. But here's the thing. Just because the head of the rivet has come to a sudden stop doesn't mean the whole rivet does. A wave has to pass along the rivet to its end saying 'Stop!' The end of the rivet will just keep on going until this wave, typically travelling at the speed of sound, reaches it. That fast-moving end will crash into the beetle long before the wave arrives. It will then send a counter wave back up the rivet and after a degree of shuddering will eventually settle down as an 8 mm rivet in a 10 mm hole. Too late, though, for that bug.

Isn't physics great?

It's toys time of year

2011-11-29T09:08:00.000Z

I confess I asked for a review copy of this book because it's hard not to get nostalgic about toys as Christmas approaches - waves of James May style nostalgia wash over you. I realized they were onto something good here when I opened the book to flick through it and found I'd read about 25 percent of it before I could force myself to stop. It's just good fun.

My suspicions are that the reason a book like this is so attractive is that when we were young (well, at least when I was young) and there were no personal electronic goods to tempt us, toys were the prime objects of our desire. We genuinely used to look into toyshop windows and lust after these things. We used to wait with eager anticipation to see if Father Christmas (none of this 'Santa' rubbish) had delivered on the day. We hadn't been bombarded by give-aways in McDonald's Happy Meals - toys were exciting.

Inevitably there are one or two favourites missing. Matchbox and Corgi cars were present, for instance, but not Dinky. And the text, while providing a lot of interesting historical factoids, was occasionally too rose-tinted. The Spirograph entry, for example, didn't mention that hardly anyone has ever made a Spirograph picture without slipping and spoiling it. Yet this collection of double page spreads, with big colour photos and genuinely interesting content was pleasurable and page-turn-demanding.

Really this ought to be the ideal gift - many, many adults over the age of 30 will appreciate it (though plenty of the toys shown are still going, or were until recently, so the appeal may be even wider). The only trouble is that some people may wonder what you are saying about them if you give them a book about toys. (Especially if it's a bloke and they're getting a book with a picture of Barbie on the firont.) So it may be that this is a gift that, on the whole, you will have to buy for yourself. But if you fancy an escape from the Christmas pressures into a time when things were less complicated, I can highly recommend it. Take a look at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Wonderful magazine, great taste

2011-11-28T08:47:00.001Z

There is no doubt that for those interested in popular science in the UK, that the premier magazine to buy is New Scientist. I can say this with firmness as they've just published their collection of 'popular science worth giving this Christmas':

I draw your attention particularly to the penultimate book on the 'shelf. Of this we read:

Inflight Science: Brian Clegg, Icon Books - Everything you ever wanted to know about the science of flying - from the terrible taste of tepid in-flight tea to how we manage to defy gravity in a pressurised aluminium cylinder.

What can I say? Excellent taste guys. (And some of the other choices are pretty good too.)

What is it with zombies?

2011-11-25T08:48:00.000Z

If I'm honest I'm not a great fan of zombie movies (I even found Sean of the Dead a little hard going). Partly it is because I find gore-based horror sickening and in no sense entertaining. (I have to look away in bits of Casuality.) For me a great horror film is one that can scare you without showing you anything gross. And then there's the usual problem with zombie movies of the slow moving predator that somehow the prey can never manage to run away from.

However, I can't deny the popularity of zombies, whether they're turning up in civil defence planning, variants of Jane Austen or in the government.

So I was very interested when 'Dr Austin' provided me a copy of his Zombie Science 1Z. This is rather a neat idea - Austin Low (the real name of Dr Austin) is a Scottish performer who specializes in comedy, working with children and science. He performs a spoof lecture on 'zombieology' and this is the book of the lecture. The idea is to take the idea of zombies seriously, try to explain them, getting in quite a lot of medical science (he suggests it's a prion-based infection) and to entertain as well.

The original version of the book was, frankly, rather poorly produced - in fact, I thought it was self-published - but it has now been significantly tidied up and though I find the content occasionally a little whimsical, it's an excellent way to get a young(ish) zombie fan interested in a bit of science. Take a look at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (Kindle fans can find it here for the UK and here for the US).

What were they thinking?

2011-11-24T08:21:00.000Z

There's a lot to love about the new TV advert for the UK's electrical/electronic retailers of last resort PC World and Curry's.

The pastiche of Star Wars is rather well done. The landing craft is believable and there's some nice acting like the almost-entirely-suppressed wince when the manager's car is crushed. Darth Vader is pretty good too.

However, have they really thought through the picture this ad puts across? Here are the key messages I pick up:

Our shops are run by an evil empire - buy things here and you are funding evil
Our training involves fear and peril
Our attitude to customer service takes its lead from Darth Vader, a (fictional) mass murderer and war criminal
Our staff are massed mindless automata of a controlling state
We are the bad guys

All in all, is this really the image that they want? Back to the drawing board, I think.

The version shown is the 'Director's Cut' which is slightly longer than the advert as broadcast

Have a word with your authors, please, publishers

2011-11-23T08:12:00.000Z

A review by some bloke

I know a bit about reviews. The first paid writing I ever did was a review for PC User magazine of a brand new shiny piece of software called Excel. I quite liked it. There followed a number of years writing reviews of business software, then computer games (which really is money for old rope) and finally books.

These days, apart from reviewing for www.popularscience.co.uk and for my blog, I do a fair number of book reviews for print publications from Wall Street Journal to Nature. And I have noticed a worrying trend. Probably because of the increase of easy communication through websites and social networking, people rather expect to be able to get in touch with a reviewer after reading their review. And a rapidly increasing number of authors are dropping me an email.

I put these emails on a scale, from 'appreciated' to 'not a good move', and sadly there are rather too many down the bottom end. Here's how they look:

Appreciated - a nice little note saying thank-you for the review. What's not to love, though the only downside is than when I see an email from an author titled 'Your review' I do get a few moments disquiet before I see it's a nice one.
Okay if justified - some emails correct an error in a review. This is fine with an online review as the correction can be published, though there's not a lot of point with a print review. However, make sure it is a genuine error. I recently had one complaining because I'd said the author used a technical term without saying what it meant. He asked me to correct the review, as he had explained the term in a note at the back of the book. Sorry, hardly anyone reads notes - the book was still difficult to understand as there was no explanation in context. I did correct the review, but I can't say I was impressed.
Silly - complaining about an opinion. A lot of the content in a review is inevitably an opinion. I recently received one as an editor (someone else wrote the review) starting 'I'm really sorry you thought this, and I am surprised at your conventionalism.' Frankly, so what? Why should I take any notice of your opinion of an opinion? All you are going to do is irritate me, and I may be responsible for another review of one of your books in the future. What's the point?
Not a good move - ad hominem attack. Some authors can't resist starting to make nasty remarks and name calling if they don't like a review I wrote. I'm sorry, I can't like every book. I didn't like yours. This is really self-defeating. Not only will this somewhat discourage me from saying nice things about you, if the insults are bad enough I will inform your publisher that you are a loose cannon and they won't be particularly happy. This isn't good for your career.

So, my recommendation: by default stick with a dignified silence. If you've got another review that's good, read that instead. If not, wonder why not. I really would only get in touch with a simple thank-you or to correct a specific factual error in an online review (e.g. if it says your book doesn't have an index, and it does). Anything else may make you feel good for a few seconds but isn't going to help and might make things worse.

Back to the apocalype

2011-11-22T08:26:00.000Z

I've been revisiting post-apocalyptic Britain. (Any poor camera work was an attempt at Blair Witch style immediacy. It says here.)

There's something about the cold, heartless autumnal sun that makes it particularly appropriate for one man and his dog to feel like the last survivors in a post-apocalyptic world.

It's all very sci fi. But Goldie doesn't care. There might be rabbits still.

Oi, copper nob!

2011-11-21T07:49:00.001Z

I'm the one on the right

I'm inspired to write this by a point made in a discussion about the Sepp Blatter/racism in football argument on our local radio station. The host, Mark O'Donnell, recalled a diversity meeting where he asked if it was any different to be insulting to someone because they're black and because they have red hair. He didn't say what the answer was, but I think it is a genuinely important question.

I admit, I'm biassed. You might not believe it now, but when I was younger I had very red hair. (And, as you can see, curly.) And I did get regular abuse because of it. Lots of name calling and nasty little remarks and even stone throwing once.

I honestly can't see why there is any difference between racial abuse and this. (In fact, technically it is racial abuse, as red hair is a Celtic racial characteristic.)

In saying this, I am not in any sense suggesting that racial abuse is okay because somehow it's 'just banter.' It is inacceptable. But I also think that it equally inacceptable to make fun of people for being ginger or red haired. It's time we stopped shrugging it off as okay because 'It's just a bit of harmless banter.' It's not okay.

When this was discussed on the radio someone phoned in to say that he worked in a bar and someone had refused to be served by 'a ginger.' This isn't just a bit of fun. It's no more or less harmless than racial insults and ought to be given exactly the same treatment. Any other attitude shows that the fight against racism is not about equality but about political correctness.

Why did the lemming cross the road?

2011-11-18T10:38:00.000Z

Aww, cute. Apparently it's stuffed.

You might be surprised that some of the most entertaining press releases I get come from the Institute of Physics. I love them dearly, but just hearing the name 'Institute of Physics' you might think they're a bit po-faced. The reality is quite different, as reflected in the latest release, a doozy entitled Could lemmings be involved in regulating our climate?

According to a paper published in the IoP's Environmental Research Letters, the greening of the Arctic may not be down to global warming alone. Although lemmings eat grass and sedge, when they are present in an area these plants actually increase their hold. There are a number of suggestions why, but the important point is that a sudden burst of extra green cover isn't necessarily a sign of climate change if there are lemmings present.

I think this is quite fun, though they could have done better. The opening paragraph of the press release says:

The mention of lemmings usually evokes images of small rodents throwing themselves off the top of cliffs in acts of mass suicide; however, their reputations might no longer be determined by hearsay as a new report suggests they could be having an intricate effect on the Earth's climate.

There's a missed opportunity to point out that the throwing themselves off cliffs bit is generally considered to be an invention of a Walt Disney nature film where they were encouraged to do so to dramatic effect, rather than 'hearsay.'

You may be concerned that the story isn't about lemmings regulating the climate (I just love the idea of a horde of lemmings in a vast control room, pulling levers to control the Earth's climate) in some Gaia-like fashion. Rather it appears to be saying that a potential flag for climate change may be being corrupted by lemmings - but there is a section a bit later on that points out that if they increase the greenery they may be changing that area's ability to be a carbon sink, hence influencing climate change, though it's a bit tenuous.

Even so, I think we should pat the IoP on the back for the way lemmings have successfully drawn attention to what otherwise could have been a rather dull story.

P.S. Anyone else remember the computer game Lemmings? I loved it!

Photograph from Wikipedia

When does marketing become lying?

2011-11-17T08:55:00.000Z

Faced with the question 'When does marketing become lying?' many of those who are suspicious of capitalism and business are likely to come up with the knee jerk response 'Is there a difference?' But that's not fair. Marketing is a perfectly legitimate and sensible activity. You would have to be stupid not to want potential customers to see your product or service in the best light - and as soon as you aspire to this, you are thinking of marketing.

Unfortunately sometimes marketing crosses the line into deception. I posted quite a while ago about a marketing campaign where apparently hand-written post-it notes were attached to fake newspapers describing a trainer's work. I've also complained to advertising standards a couple of times about advertising that I think crosses the line. In both cases they didn't agree. One involved paper junk mail for a charity where the envelope implied it contained important personal information and it didn't.

The other was an email that had a subject line that said you had won a prize - in the body of the email it turned out that you hadn't won, you just had an opportunity to enter a competition to win said prize. Now I think that's deception. I wouldn't have read the email if it hadn't been for that lying subject line, and that wasted my time. But advertising standards didn't back me up. Sigh.

I've just had some spam that really pushes the boundary on fibbing, though. It starts out like this:

Hi Brian
I had so many business cards in my drawer that
I have put them all in a Rolodex efficiently.

It may have been a while since we met,
sorry I haven’t been in touch sooner.

However, I would like to get you lunch if I may please,
it would be a great opportunity to meet again after
such a long time.

It goes on to try to get me to go along to some kind of (apparently free) event including lunch. Now I have never met this person and have certainly not given them my card. This is made doubly clear because I received the mail twice to two different email addresses, one of which isn't on my card. What I don't understand is why the people sending this out think it will encourage me to think positively of someone who is fibbing about knowing me. Sorry, guys, it's a turn off. When marketing crosses the line it ceases to have a positive value. And that's a lesson every business needs to learn.

Ety-what-Icon?

2011-11-16T08:22:00.000Z

I sometimes get sent to read a book that doesn't fit with www.popularscience.co.uk but that I want to tell the world about. Such a book is The Etymologicon.

I ought to get a disclaimer out of the way - this title is published by Icon, the same people who publish my Inflight Science, but don't worry, I've slagged off their books in the past.

As the name sort of suggests, this is a book about where words come from, which as a writer I'm a sucker for - but anyone should find it fun. It's light, entertaining and fascinating. Did you know for instance that 'pool' as in pooling resources and playing pool has nothing to do with water and everything to do with chickens (poulets en France).This is really one of those books where you have to fight hard to resist telling anyone in earshot little snippets every five minutes.

Any moans? Just occasionally I lost interest a tad, but it quickly picked up again and the flowing structure of little chapters meant that it's easy to just read one more. And one more. And another. Someone I spoke to who had already read it made a big thing of the way the end of each mini-chapter leads into the next one (ending up pointing back to the first chapter, hence the 'circular stroll' in the subtitle). I actually found this the least endearing part of the book - I found these links forced and unnecessary. But it just shows, you can't please all the people all the time.

In its rather handsome small hardback form (no dustcover, though) it's clearly intended as a gift book - and is going to make a great one - but this is also a book I would consider unashamedly buying for yourself. If you like words, it's for you.

You can see more about the book at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com... and for Kindle readers here in the UK and here in the US.

Top ten book marketing tips

2011-11-15T08:26:00.001Z

Working an audience at Blackwell's, Oxford

Something that's regular asked over on the Litopia website is why authors are expected to work at marketing their books (surely that's what publishers get such a large chunk of the income for?) and what authors should realistically be expected to do.

The simple answer to the first part is because your book is more important to you than it is to them. I'm not saying that the publisher doesn't love it, but they've got to share that love across however many books they are publishing this season. You just have the one.

It's not that the publisher won't do stuff. They will put a lot of effort into trying to get the book reviewed and mentioned in the media (including sending out typically 100-200 review copies). They will look for opportunities for you to appear at festivals and similar gatherings. They may, if it's a big book, set up a website. But don't expect too much. Specifically they are very unlikely (unless you are a celebrity) to do any poster/TV advertising, so don't be disappointed.

However there's a lot more that you as an author can do. Here's my tips to help get your book noticed:

Be prepared to give time for anything your publisher sets up (interviews, broadcasts, public appearances). If you are reluctant to do your bit, they will soon lose interest.
Make it part of your everyday communications. Put the details (including links to buy it) in your email signature, for example.
Look for opportunities to be visible locally, things the publisher might not do - local radio/newspaper, contact your local bookshop about a signing etc.
Use blogging, Twitter, Facebook etc. to spread the word. But don't get tedious about. All too often people stop following you if all you do is sell. Try to give added value.
Set up a Facebook page for your book and optionally a website for your book.
Consider doing your own book launch if the publishers aren't doing one (and most books don't get one). I've never done this, but quite a lot of authors do, and if you organize it right you can get some visibility.
Get yourself set up as a Goodreads author and set up author pages on Amazon.com/Amazon.co.uk
Email everyone you know. This has to be done subtly. Do a personal email, but include stuff about your book. It takes time, but is much better received than a generic mail to a mailing list.
Look for specialist websites (like my www.popularscience.co.uk for popular science books) that might tell a targeted audience about your book.
Do an online search for relevent businesses that might have an interest. For example, when I did a book about infinity, I emailed companies with 'Infinity' in their name to see if any wanted to buy copies as a corporate giveaway. One ordered 100 copies.

Does this sound like too much effort? It probably is compared with the return you will see for any particular activity. But the fact is there are a couple of million books out there in print in English. If you don't do everything you can to get noticed, in a way that will get you noticed rather than irritate people, then you can resign yourself to staying in the long tail of books that don't sell many copies. It's up to you.

Added P.S. - Excellent 11th suggestion from Neil Ansell:

One thing you don't mention is a book trailer. I filmed mine myself but it was edited and posted by the publishers. It's had 4000 hits and counting, which doesn't exactly make me Justin Bieber, but is encouraging nonetheless.

Nanodry

2011-11-14T08:23:00.001Z

I've always been interested in nanotechnology. In part it's because it winds up the Soil Association, who really don't like it. But mostly because there's something fascinating about technology that uses components that are verging on the quantum scale. And there's the 'Fascinating Voyage/Incredible Shrinking Man' aspect of seeng the world differently when looking from a very small perspective. As Richard Feynman said in a piece on the subject, there's plenty of room at the bottom.

Although the pinups of nanotechnology are nanobots, which for the moment remain more comfortable in science fiction than in a manufacturing plant, the everyday uses are both more mundane and more realistic. Probably the most widely used at the moment is in sunblock, which makes use of nanoparticles to block the nasty UV, but I rather like the look of a nanotechology being used to make trainers and other flexible materials water repellant. Let's face it, there's nothing more depressing that a pair of trainers the water has leaked through. The smell of soggy trainers is bad enough at the best of times, and the feel of that water coming through is horrible.

Abingdon-based P2i have produced a nanotechnology coating that is 'hydrophobic.' This possibly isn't the best choice of adjective, as hydrophobia is another name for rabies, but the idea is simple enough - we're talking molecules that don't like water and repel it, while allowing the material to 'breathe.' The neat thing about working at the nanolevel is that water works that way too. Unlike ordinary coatings, this stuff takes on water molecules at their own scale, reducing their chances of slipping through the gaps.

Apparently the technology is already used by a range of snazzy sports brands, is employed on around 50 percent of hearing aids (who wants a soggy hearing aid?) and is soon to appear on mobile phones. But the specific application that caught my attention was the pictured running shoe from Magnum, which has the added benefit of a £10 donation to Help for Heroes from each pair sold.

In good hair product advertising mode, let me put on my white coat so I can say here is the science stuff and lazily reproduce some information from a press release:

The liquid-repellent nano-coating technology is based on PhD research carried out by Stephen Coulson, at Durham University. It originated as a project within the UK Government's Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (DSTL), to make soldiers' protective clothing more effective against chemical attack while maintaining comfort.

P2i's technology employs a special pulsed ionized gas (plasma), which is created within a vacuum chamber, to attach a nanometer-thin polymer layer over the entire surface of a product. This dramatically lowers the product's surface energy, so that when liquids come into contact with it, they form beads and simply roll off.

The nano-coating technology can deliver performance benefits for a wide range of materials, including polymers, metals, fabrics, leather, ceramics, glass and paper. Even complex, 3D objects incorporating several different materials can be treated successfully.

Ooh, er. Apparently the trainer to look out for is the V-Lite Intrepid HPi H4H, which isn't the catchiest of names, but hey. They are rather scarily priced at £100 (even more scarily they're £175 on Amazon, which I like to think is a mistake), which is more than I would pay for a pair of plimsoles, but if you are into this kind of thing I'm given to believe that this not usual pricing for such hi-tech kit.

If you mess up, don't sue people who point it out

2011-11-11T08:21:00.000Z

An award that does not get anyone sued

This is a very sad story from the world of writing. A couple of years ago a company set up an awards scheme for British writers called the Brit Writers Awards. Their company's business was making money from helping starting writers, but the awards appear to have been genuinely to support new writers, and the first ones went well. I really have no problem with their aiming to make money from the services they offer to authors if they're upfront about it.

Unfortunately, after a couple of years, things started going a little wrong. I have no information on what happened, but my suspicion is that they weren't making enough money out of the business to keep things going properly. At this point, when people were starting to get disappointed and suspicious, a well respected authors' site published some comments about this situation - only to be threatened with legal action.

This really isn't good enough. The people running the company need to accept responsibility for their mess, and to accept that people will flag it up. They should answer the questions being posed to them. But most of all, they should desist from threats of legal action, which simply make it look as if they guilty of more dubious dealings than they really are.

Getting back at the spammers

2011-11-09T09:10:00.002Z

One of my fun emails this morning

I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets deluged with a daily dose of spam, though I probably get more than most as a reward for having one of my email addresses on my website. On the whole I just delete it without a moment's thought. It's part of the background that I don't really notice, like breathing.

I have to admit I was caught out once. I had just done something on eBay (can't remember what) and at just the right timing a spam email arrived asking me to log into eBay to check a query from my buyer. I fell for it for about 30 seconds, then hurriedly got into the proper eBay and changed my password. As far as I know nothing resulted.

However, when I'm in a less easy-going mood I want to get my own back. Take just a few of today's batch.

When I get told that I have 'irregular activity on my Internet banking account' at Barclays or HSBC (or some American bank I've never heard of) I want to take the spammers by the scruff of the neck, shake them, and say 'I don't even have an account with this bank, you moron!' Or better still, I want the bank in question to make good use of some of those obscene profits they make to trace the sender back through the net, pick them up, and lock them in their vaults.

Similarly when I get a message from 'Larry Grahams' at Canary Wharf that starts:

Attn: Dear Partner
I got your response to my proposal I am so delighted to Informed you that the Consignment’s in question is currently in the UN Cooperate fiduciary agent office in U.S.
Upon your respond to this message i will put together a special arrangement to have the Consignment’s deliver to you directly in your door step with the same help of the UN diplomat.

I want to take 'Larry Grahams' and shove his consignment where the sun don't shine, taking similar action with all those 'no need to enter' lotteries and bequests from random people (mostly called something like Reverend Cheerybell Butterbucket or something) I keep receiving.

I realize I can't do anything, but I so want to get back at them. Is there no way? I want to irritate them back, to get the authorities kicking their door down, and quite possibly to have something illegal under various international conventions happen to them. But all I can do is delete their spam. It's not fair.

It's all J. K. Rowling's fault

2011-11-08T08:47:00.000Z

I've finally realized who is responsible for the current financial mess in Europe - it's J. K. Rowling. I think that the malevolent influence of her Gringotts Bank has leaked out of novel-space and is corrupting the real world. Let's look at the evidence.

The way Rowling's wizarding world works is to take some aspect of the real world and twist it in such a way that it becomes odd, strange and lacking real-world logic.

Just look at what has been happening with Italy lately. The financial community has concerns that Italy may not be able to pay its debts. What's the logical thing to do in such circumstances? Obviously lighten the load a bit. Perhaps temporarily reduce the interest rates they have to pay. So what do the financial wonks do? Put their interest rates up. Oh, yes, that will help them stay solvent. Logical? Only if you think quidditch makes any sense.

If this kind of mad, fairytale behaviour isn't enough to convince you, just look at the rating agencies. Can you really believe that companies like Standard and Poors, and Moody's (Moody's?!?) are part of the real world? What logical world would put the financial security of countries in the hands of a few small private companies who can arbitrarily decide if they are good credit risks? This is clearly Potterworld logic.

I'm sorry. I'm sure she's a nice person. But it's time Ms Rowling was hauled in front of a parliamentary committee to explain how she is managing to influence the money matters of the planet.

Can supermarkets ever be green?

2011-11-07T11:40:00.000Z

On the way to the corner shop (picture not same day)

I was toddling down to our corner shop, aka the Asda Walmart superstore on Sunday on a beautiful (if chilly) blue skies morning, wondering why anyone ever drives to the supermarket if they live as close as I do. It was so much nicer to walk.

At least, that's what I thought on the way. Coming back, carrying everything for a Sunday roast plus milk, cans of Coke etc. I felt like a decidedly overloaded beast of burden. Usually, though, I manage fine, using the supermarket as a corner shop and just buying what I can easily carry. It means I go more often, but I can walk and feel smugly green.

The only thing is, I'm not really encouraged to do this. Asda has a deal that if you spend £40 you get £5 off your next shop - but unless you are buying high value items, it's hard to spend more than about £20 and carry it home. This isn't just an Asda problem. All the main supermarkets have deals where you have to spend £40, 50 or even 60 pounds to get discounts, money off petrol and so on. In effect these deals tie the customer into using a car.

Come on supermarketpersons! Let's see a deal that allows your shoppers to be green! There must be some way to amalgamate a series of small purchases over a relatively short period of time. Get imaginative.

Replication and big toys

2011-11-04T09:41:00.000Z

A simulation of a Higgs discovery. Allegedly.

The recent kerfuffle about faster-than-light neutrinos has stirred an old concern in my mind. One of the essentials of good science is being able to replicate the results. Any particular experimental setup can always mislead those using it because they get something wrong that they don't realize. This is why the neutrino guys have asked other experimenters to try to confirm what they have found.

A classic lesson in the dangers of relying on a single experimental setup is the one that emerges from the work of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. They were the people behind the cold fusion debacle in 1989. This was, as far as I can tell, a serious experiment by good scientists. They got some amazing results from their single experimental setup then did something stupid. Instead of attempting to publish in a journal and get peer review, they went straight to the press.

There are two reasons this was stupid. It was partly because it missed the opportunity for critical suggestions from reviewers. And it was partly because the science community hates a show-off and is always suspicious of going directly to the press. It meant that the rest of the community was much heavier on the pair, who had a perfectly legitimate idea that turned out not to be particularly good, than they otherwise would be. Most ideas in science fall by the wayside. There's no problem with this, if you go about it the right way. But once other labs tried to duplicate cold fusion and got nothing, the suspicions started to rise and Pons & Fleischmann were torn to pieces. (Not literally. Scientists aren't that bad. Not quite.)

But here's the concern I have. Just imagine the LHC gang announce that they've found the Higgs boson. Whoops and hurrahs all round. But who is going to duplicate this result? If theirs is the only toy big enough to do the job, who can say that this isn't another cold fusion? Of course they'll check it and do all they can to ring the changes - but the fact is it's the same experimental setup with the same people, and that always carries a risk. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade - but I do think particle physicists need to be really careful about exactly what they announce when their experiments can't be duplicated.

Image from Wikipedia

A pleasingly rotund Rumpole

2011-11-03T08:05:00.000Z

As many a comedian-turned-writer has found to his or her cost, writing good humorous fiction is a whole different level of difficulty to simply being funny on stage. I can count on the fingers of one hand the authors who have consistently managed to combine genuinely funny writing with style and readability. Wodehouse, of course, has to be one of those digits. (But don't get me started on so called humorous Booker Prize nominees - they wouldn't know funny if it bit them.) And one chubby finger surely must be allocated to John Mortimer and Rumpole of the Bailey.

Mortimer wasn't the first to combine the law and humour. There was a lot of gentle amusement to be had from Henry Cecil's series of law-based novels like Brothers in Law. Cecil's was observational humour. His stories were based on experiences real barristers might go through, just exaggerated to bring out the funny side. Rumpole, on the other hand, is full scale legal pantomime, bringing on full scale laughter to Cecil's gentle smile.

As a character, Horace Rumpole has everything going for him. He is a supporter of the underdog, always the defender, always prepared to pull a success from the jaws of failure, despite the whole legal system weighing against him. If he has a tendency to resort to catch phrases... it's not exactly unheard of in comedy. He is a relic in his chambers, for ever battling the forces of modernization and efficiency, forever injecting the human touch... plus a cigar, and a large glass of Chateau Thames Embankment.

Rumpole is, simply one of the best literary creations of the twentieth century. If you haven't read any Rumpole, the new collection I've just got hold of is going to be the ideal introduction. It combines seven stories chosen by the author as his favourites in 1993 with seven of a more recent vintage. This gives an excellent feel for the whole opus, around 80 stories and a handful of novels. If, like me, you are a long term Rumpole fan, I admit there is less to make you rush to the bookstore, as they've all been published before, though the most recent of the stories, Rumpole and the Christmas Break, is one that had so far evaded me.

For the out-and-out Rumpole devotees there are also the first three chapters of a Rumpole novel, left unfinished on Mortimer's death. I really can't bring myself to read this, as once I've started a Rumpole I need to finish it, and as soon as possible. To venture into that would be cruel indeed.

If you haven't read much Rumpole (or none at all), or if you want a Rumpole-oid gift it's hard to go wrong with this 500 page collection, as pleasingly rotund as the great man himself. It's pure legal comedy gold. Forever Rumpole is available from Amazon.co.uk as a hardback or on Kindle and similarly from Amazon.com as hardback and on Kindle.

The HD/Blu-Ray fraud

2011-11-02T10:29:00.000Z

Please don't ask why they're watching an HD microwave

I was privileged to be one of the first people in the UK to see broadcast HD TV in action at Sky's launch of their HD box many years ago. At the time very few TVs were HD ready - now it's the majority. Yet there was a question I was bursting to ask at Sky's event that still applies when you see HD and Blu-Ray being pushed today.

What I couldn't understand was why Sky didn't show HD alongside normal TV, so you can see how much better it was. They kept going on about the extra detail and clarity and brilliant picture, so I asked this at their launch why we didn't see that side-by-side comparison. They came out with some technie-wechnie excuse for why they couldn't show both images simultaneously. But there was a much better reason for their decision.

Just go into a TV showroom and look at all the TVs showing HD and Blu-ray. Again, why isn't there a clear comparison so we know it's worth paying extra for the technology? Here's that same issue rearing it's ugly head.

The fact is that, although HD is significantly higher resolution, producing clearer, sharper pictures, ordinary digital TV is already pretty good and on many programmes the difference is hardly perceptible. They don't do side by side comparisons because if you saw them, you'd realise there's no great advantage to switching. Except to the wallets of manufacturers and retailers.

My head's in the iCloud

2011-11-01T08:35:00.000Z

For many years my definitive address book and diary have resided on my computer. I really can't remember when I last used one of those paper things. The problem with this was that when I was out at a meeting, I couldn't check my diary, so had to cross my fingers and hope, if necessary ringing up to modify an appointment later.

Since having the iPhone (and more recently the iPad) things had improved significantly, because every time I synchronized my mobile devices they got up-to-date copies of diary and address book, so when I was out and about I had access to these crucial resources. They might be a touch out of date, but essentially it was all there. What's more I now had extra backups of this essential data - and unlike users of a mobile phone with a conventional, unsynchronized address book I would never lose my phone numbers.

In the last week, Apple has launched iCloud, and with it my situation has changed again - and more fundamentally than I first thought. The migration was not without a little pain. When the Apple software was attempting to set things up, its duplication correction module went beserk, so now every entry in my diary is in twice and several people in my address book have two copies of their address.

What's more, the process has partially screwed up my desktop control centre, Outlook. It has moved my address book and diary to one hosted on iCloud, patched through to the Outlook system. Outlook is designed to be able to incorporate external sources, but it very much regards them as 'the rest' rather than the main one. So several of Outlook's useful features, like displaying the next six diary entries on the home screen and being able to add flags to emails to put them on your to do list have stopped working.

But in return I have a more fundamental change then I realized. Up to now, mentally, my 'real' address book and diary have been on the PC. So if I want to look up an address I would use the PC, even though it's a bit clumsy. Now my 'real' address book is in iCloud, so my natural tendency has moved to use either the iPad or the iPhone - and that's quite a fundamental shift. (It also means I can see my diary and address book from any internet connected computer, but the times I'm likely to use this seem very small.)

This is a significant shift of mindset, which I simply hadn't realized would come with the process. It will be interesting to see how things evolve...

Is this a Christmas song record?

2011-10-31T09:45:00.000Z

I had the misfortune to have to listen to a bit of Radio 1 at the weekend (it's not my fault, the children made me) and suffered the new Justin Bieber record.

I'm sorry to go all grumpy old man, but it's OCTOBER for goodness sake, and he's released a Christmas record.

And what a Christmas record.

It's as if the writers said 'How many Christmas clichés can we cram into one song?' To save you the pain of listening to it, here are the ones I spotted:

Beautiful time of year
[Christmas] cheer
Under the mistletoe
the winter snow
Chestnuts roasting [on a fire]
Santa's coming tonight
Reindeers flying in the sky
Making a list
Wise men followed the star
Very merry Christmas

Somewhat bizarrely in the chorus he seems to be enjoying being with his 'shoddy'. Rumour has it that what he was intending to sing was the southern US slang 'shawty' for girlfriend, but I'm convinced he's singing 'shoddy' - which pretty well describes this song.

Nostalgia cash

2011-10-28T08:03:00.000+01:00

A Barclaycash slip - lug holes either end of blue strip

On a university tour with one of my daughters the other day, after an hour of trying (and often failing) to make out what a 'student ambassador' with an impossibly thick accent was saying, I stopped at a cash machine and was overcome by a sudden wave of nostalgia.

The thing is, I first used a cash machine when I was at university. But, children, we are not talking cash machines as you know them today. There was no plastic card involved. This was Barclaycash, a cross between an ATM and a chequebook.


You put the slip in drawer 1, entered your pin and opened drawer 2

Customers were issued with a book of little slips and a PIN. The slips were for fixed amounts of money and had to be located on little lugs before the machine ate them and spat out the cash. Or, rather, you opened a drawer and there was cash waiting. (I had forgotten until seeing the example above that you signed the slip, just like a cheque.)

Ah, how jealous friends who were with different banks marvelled at the advanced technology. We were practically living the 21st century life. Any day soon we'd have jet packs...

Enter the wonder drug

2011-10-27T10:07:00.001+01:00

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again.

We take painkillers like paracetamol for granted these days, but when aspirin emerged on the scene, it was a dramatic breakthrough. Its cousin might have been easing pain as powdered willow bark for millennia, but this was something special - so special, in fact, that it featured in a treaty that ended a world war. Have a listen to the rise, fall and rise again story of aspirin.

A dalek in Asda

2011-10-24T10:21:00.003+01:00

A dalek (probably not in Asda)

Yesterday there was an dalek in our local Asda. Apart from offering the opportunity for a quick tweet ('Just seen a dalek at Asda. I always thought they shopped at Lidl.') it inspired me to think about what has happened to fear in children.

If, at the age of 8, when I first encountered daleks on TV, I had met one rolling down the frozen food aisle, I would probably have wet myself. In practice this couldn't have happened. First we didn't have a fridge when I was 8, and second there were no supermarkets in Rochdale yet. We still did our food shopping at the Home and Colonial. But I digress. I am a member of the generation that genuinely hid behind the sofa to watch something like Doctor Who.

We peered in terrified delight over the top of the couch at the rather murky images of that first Doctor Who adventure, ready to duck down if necessary. Daleks were seriously scary. In 2011, as far as I can gather, nothing much phases an eight-year-old. Given there hasn't been a huge amount of evolution in my lifetime (I'm not that old), what has happened? Is it that they're all exposed to Saw and other such DVDs from the age of two? I really don't know. But I didn't see one child clutching at their parents, showing fear when the dalek came down the aisle. Bring back the good old days, I say...

Image from Wikipedia

Potatoes and dogs

2011-10-23T12:27:00.001+01:00

Probably not very tasty

N.B. Before reading this, please be assured I do not condone eating dogs. It shouldn't be done. I love dogs. We are in hypothetical world here.

I was on one of my rare excursions to the pub the other day and the conversation turned, as it does, to potatoes (we'd just been served up with a bowl of chips). One of our number who should have known better (he has a chemistry degree) said something to the effect of 'I've always wondered how potatoes can be so varied in the way they cook. You know, some are great for mash, others for roasting or whatever.'

We raised our collective eyebrows and pointed out that given selective breeding had produced such a range in dogs (for instance), it was hardly surprising that you could get different kinds of potatoes that cook differently.

'Ah, yes,' he pointed out. 'Dogs look very different. But they probably all taste the same.'

Now here's the thing. In a purely hypothetical, scientific fashion, I can't help but wonder if he was right. Is a chihuahua like chicken, but a great dane more like beef? Or do all dogs taste the same? I really don't want anyone to find out, but it does make you wonder.

We then went on to discuss Greek gods. Specifically, did the ancient Greeks believe in their gods as actual entities, or did they consider them merely to be instructive myths?

You see, that's the sort of thing you get down the pub. Downright educational. It's not all football.

The missing translations

2011-10-21T08:15:00.000+01:00

Between 1999 and 2001, initially with Paul Birch and then on my own, I wrote a series of business books for publisher Kogan Page titled Instant X where X was something like creativity or time management. These did reasonably well - a couple are still in print (and some out of print ones are available as bargain price ebooks - one is even free).

These books were written for a small advance, but some have made a steady little income through translations. To give you an idea, there are eight books in the series, but this is what my set of unique copies looks like:

Those eight books have gone a long way

After the first handful, the rest are all either in different languages or versions for other countries.

This is lovely, but there is something of a frustration that attaches to my rather nice boasting shelf. I haven't got copies of all the translations. Every now and then I will get a letter from the publisher to say they have sold these books in Indonesian - or a new entry will creep onto the royalty statements. And sometimes, as you see above, I get my author copies. But I know of at least two sets that I have never received.

There's something rather spooky about there being some editions of my books out there in the world that I've never laid eyes on. I can but hope they will arrive one day.

The key to the road

2011-10-20T09:29:00.000+01:00

My very own, rather battered RAC key

This is the story of an iconic object that has become a useless part of a bygone age.

I was driving #1 daughter back from her shift in the pub kitchen the other night (if you've got children, it's only fair that they get sent out to work) and we passed a car pulled up on the verge. The owner was beside it, talking expansively into his mobile phone.

'What,' she said, as if speaking of ancient history, 'did people used to do when they broke down before they had mobile phones?'

I was able to explain that once upon time there were phone boxes scattered by the roadside in out of the way places, boxes that could only be entered by those who carried the special keys issued by the AA and the RAC. That's how you would ring for rescue. A bit like a Dr Who police box, but for drivers. I'm not sure if she believed me.

I don't know why, but I cherish my RAC key. It roots me in a different time. Don't get me wrong, I prefer having my iPhone. The key is useless for almost everything I use the iPhone for every day. But it still feels special.

Recovering nicely

2011-10-19T09:59:00.000+01:00

My next book to come out is How to Build a Time Machine, which launches in the US on 6 December - expect to hear rather more about it then. It has produced a lot of interest, including an extract which is going to feature in a major US magazine (more on that later too), and I think it could do well.

What has been fascinating is that it will the first of my books from US publisher St. Martin's Press that will also be published in the UK by a British publisher that has bought the rights - in this case the fiercely independent Duckworth.

As I have already mentioned, they have decided that the UK edition will have a different title - Build Your Own Time Machine - and they have now gone public with the cover, which is strikingly different in style from the US version. I like both, but I'm sure some people will have a favourite.

The British version is out in January - and I'm looking forward to receiving my copies of both, and, hopefully, arranging to do some talks on the subject.

I have seen the original design for the UK cover, where the inventor had a suit and tie, with the tie flying back in the breeze. As open neck shirts are definitely more me, I'm pleased to see that he has thrown away his shackles of formality in the final version.

Turning a pale blue

2011-10-18T08:56:00.000+01:00

I'm shocked. I have discovered that I'm feeling more positive about the Conservatives than I ever have before. I'm not a Conservative voter, which makes this decidedly worrying. (Apart from my very first election when, as a student, I voted that way as a protest against all the holier-than-thou preaching from the left wing students.)

The thing is, my heart is Liberal Democrat, but my head is Conservative. This is why, despite voting Liberal for many years, for a couple of elections I supported New Labour. I really thought we might be getting the best of the two, while the reality seems to show we got the worst. This is also why I was very pleased to have the coalition.

It's not that I agree with all Conservative policies. I think their ideas on the NHS are poor, and their approach to university fees is wrong, for example. But I've never yet come across a government that had policies 100% in line with my own - and this is hardly surprising. In the end, I am pro-business. I know capitalism is terrible - but like democracy, despite being awful, it's better than any of the alternatives. I like the idea of limiting government interference. And I like the idea of people being rewarded for making an effort.

What made me realize that the balance had tipped is that apart from the issues mentioned above, where a topic is contentious in the coalition, I tend to come down on the blue side, rather than the yellow.

Now there's a problem here. My friend Henry Gee has discovered that it's not a good thing to be a Conservative in the primarily left wing science community. His colleagues seem to feel that his political inclinations represent a moment of madness, and he should be regularly told how stupid he is about this. As the writing community also has more than its fair share of the left leaning, I expect I might get one or two nasty comments myself. But I felt it was important to be honest.

I'm open to persuasion to return to the fold. My heart still loves that black bird on a yellow background. But my head subscribes to the Times iPad edition.

New World dissonance

2011-10-17T08:29:00.000+01:00

Ah, America. Love it or hate it, you can't ignore it. Looking from the outside it's a continent of contrasts and mysteries. Both north and south were colonized by great powers of their day, yet their histories could not be more different. I can hardly think of an American I've met who wasn't an affable, helpful, kind person - and yet American institutions have been responsible for so many unconscionable actions. Perhaps most of all, this is the continent that was once the New World but has now to face up with being the Middle Aged World as the New label moves to China and India.

Given the significance of the Americas, we could all do with a better understanding of where this continent's present state all came from, which is where Charles C. Mann's book 1493 comes in. As the tag line goes it's about 'how Europe's discovery of the Americas revolutionized trade, ecology and life on Earth.' That's a big claim, but on the whole it delivers. I'm no historian, so I can't give any comment on how accurately Mann covers the past, but I can say this is the kind of history book that draws you in. It's not dull, it's good historical story telling.

The only real complain I have about this book is the size. I can't stand big fat books - and this is, without doubt, a wristbuster. It's the best argument for the Kindle I've seen in a long time. It's getting on for 5 centimetres thick and weighs in at around a kilo with 535 pages including back material. I would have enjoyed it even more if it had been half the size. Still, undoubtedly interesting. Read more about it Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (if you have delicate wrists it's also on Kindle at Amazon.com).

What has happened to nursing?

2011-10-14T08:57:00.000+01:00

Come back Florence, all is forgiven

There has been quite a lot of fuss in the news this week about terrible care taking place in hospitals. I was listening to the Health Secretary on the radio and he was saying that poor care from nurses was down to bad leadership. I'm not sure this is the whole of the answer.

When they had a vox pop on the programme a little earlier, the daughter of a badly-cared-for patient was saying that she repeatedly asked for help from nurses to do basic things, but 'they didn't care - they seemed to feel it was beneath them'. And I'd suggest that this is a contributory factor.

Once upon a time, nurses did basic medical checks - but their primary role was nursing. Caring for people. In the last 30 years, their training has become increasingly medicalized (if there is such a word). They are trained to be and to think of themselves more as doctors lite. The inevitable result is that some nurses feel that it really isn't their problem to worry about a patient's basic physical state, they are there to deal with the medical side.

Don't get me wrong. Many, many nurses do a wonderful job. But I would suggest that those who do are managing to do this despite their training, rather than as a result of it, and there should be just as much focus on this as on failings in leadership.

Picture from Wikipedia

The compounds made to kill

2011-10-13T08:56:00.000+01:00

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again.

My grandfather served in the first world war, lying about his age in his eagerness to sign up and fight for his country. In later years, he told many tales of warfare in Belgium. But nothing held the same horror for him as the gas attacks. Though he never experienced them first hand, they remained the ultimate bogeymen of that terrible conflict.

The sulfur mustards were the final, most terrible agents of chemical warfare deployed in the first world war - and they are the subject of today's podcast. The evil compounds that most of us know inaccurately but potently as mustard gas.

The Litmus test for science in fiction

2011-10-12T07:46:00.000+01:00

I love both popular science and science fiction, and like the idea of lablit, fiction with a science setting that isn't science fiction per se. But there is another crossover between science and writing that ought to be great but that never quite makes it - this is fiction that has the intention of putting across a serious scientific message.

Every now and then we get a book for review at www.popularscience.co.uk that attempts to do just this. A good example was the novel Pythagoras' Revenge by Arturo Sangalli. The idea was excellent and Sangalli nearly achieved the desired result. It genuinely did put across the maths (in this case) in a more approachable way. Unfortunately the fiction itself wasn't great. And this seems to be the challenge that most attempts at doing this fall down on. Either the fiction is poor, the science isn't very good, or the whole thing comes across as too worthy and dull. It is clearly very difficult to do well.

So I had mixed feelings when I got a copy of Litmus, a collection of short stories illustrating science themes. You can see what I thought of the book by following the link to the review, but in summary it was another worthy failure. Many of the stories were either not very good, or so full of their own artistry that they obscured the science. The book tried to get around this by following each story with a little explanation of the science and historical context, but this made things worse. It broke the flow of the stories and poured on a rather condescending dullness.

I don't like to admit defeat in anything that is being used to popularize science. But I am beginning to think that using fiction to get across the message is doomed to failure because you have two such contradictory aims. Something rather similar seems to happen on TV show QI when someone on the panel who is into science starts to expound a little on a science subject. The other panellists typically start acting bored and the whole thing falls flat.

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of ways to get people more aware and informed about science that can entertain and inspire. But I'm not sure writing fiction with a science context is one of them. Science in fiction is fine - but as soon as it becomes 'education about science in fiction' it falls flat.

The Fox and the hounds

2011-10-11T08:42:00.000+01:00

UK news is currently full of the story of Defence Secretary Liam Fox. Doctor Fox, as he is all too frequently called (wasn't that the name of a DJ?), is in the middle of a storm of accusation because of allowing a close friend, Adam Werritty to act as if he were an official advisor and accompany Fox on a range of official visits. This doesn't look too good, especially as it's possible Werritty could benefit financially from it - something that he may not have done, but certainly could have done.

What I find fascinating is the way that those who speak up on Fox's behalf - bluff Tories one and all - are producing the most irrelevent arguments. They seem to fall into two camps:

Liam Fox is a nice guy - well, yes, so are quite a lot criminals. This doesn't signify anything.
They are saying this about Liam Fox because they want to do him down

Let's look at that second accusation in a bit more detail. Notice that it is an argument about motive, not substance. Just transfer the argument to a mass murderer for a moment to show how useless it is. Imagine someone has very clearly committed a mass murder. There is absolutely solid evidence that he did it. No question. But his defence team argue that we should ignore it, because the people who are putting forward the evidence don't like the murderer. Yes, that's a fine argument, folks. That will get him off.

The facts seem to be that Werritty presented himself as an offical advisor, including having a business card saying this, embossed with the trademark portcullis of the government. There is good evidence that Werritty accompanied Fox on 18 of his 48 overseas trips (not spin from his enemies, data from the Ministry of Defence). It really doesn't matter why people are saying this, the facts are clear.

This was unacceptable behaviour for someone in Liam Fox's position and he must have known that. This makes it rather pathetic when those defending Fox say 'I'm sure he has learned from this.' A 15-year-old would know this isn't a good idea. If he needed to learn from this, he shouldn't be doing a serious political job. Send him back to the surgery.

I genuinely don't want the government destablized. I think it is bad for the country in the current difficult climate, and it's a shame. But this is a fox that should be given to hounds and dispatched immediately.

Image from Wikipedia

The joy of analogue

2011-10-10T08:28:00.000+01:00

I was half-listening to the BBC radio show The Museum of Curiosity over the weekend when something caught my ear. One of the guests, popular maths writer Alex Bellos, was talking about a mechanical pocket calculator from the 1940s. One of the other guests, Jimmy Carr commented that it went out of fashion when 'everything went digital' (or words to that effect). I was expecting Bellos to jump on him from a great height, but instead he said that, yes, soon after computers took over.

Not only is Jimmy Carr's statement inherently wrong, but the whole discussion is an example of (probably unintentional) historical revisionism, missing out on a fascinating stage in the development of computing technology.

My dad's circular slide rule

Carr's comment was so wrong because a mechanical calculator is digital. We tend to equate digital and electronic - but forget why we do this. It's because (digital) mechanical calculators were mostly ousted in science and engineering by analogue calculators (also mechanical) which in turn were replaced by (digital) electronic calculators. To take the story straight from mechanical to electronic is poor history to say the least.

The analogue revolution that Carr and Bellos ignored is the slide rule, making fast complex calculations easy. We tend to look down on analogue solutions because they are approximate - though they can be made as accurate as you like - but all we're really saying there is that they're natural. Digital may be the reality at the quantum level, but the world we experience (including many aspects of the way our brains work) is analogue.

I used to have a beautiful circular slide rule that was my father's. The advantage of the circular version is that in a compact device, less than 10 centimetres across, you had the equivalent of a straight slide rule much too long to use. And it was lovely to twiddle and do those calculations. I confess I sold it, because I'm not much of a collector, and it is certainly obsolete, but it doesn't stop it being a wonderful device.

I'm all in favour of using humorous programmes to get across science and history - but do make sure you get your facts right, guys.

Ball of Confusion

2011-10-07T09:12:00.000+01:00

For UK TV viewers of a certain age, Johnny Ball is something of a legend. Sadly I never watched him as a child, but for a whole generation he made finding out stuff about how the world works fun. And I can say from personal experience that (unlike many famous people) he's a really nice guy.

This is a book of 'puzzles, problems and perplexing posers' - just the thing for a Friday. They vary from classic 'if two cats could kill three mice in...' type problems, through logic problems to tricky little numbers that rely on very careful reading of the question.

Inevitably, if you've been about a bit like me, you will have come across a few of them before. And there are bound to be some you just can't be bothered with. But as long as you get any enjoyment out of these types of brain teasers you are bound to find something that is truly entertaining. And, of course, Johnny Ball presents them with his characteristic charm. Just occasionally I found his 'funny' intros to the problems better suited to a ten-year-old's taste than mine, but mostly they are fun and keep the book from being literally a list of puzzles.

The only criticism I have is that when you are setting puzzles, some of which involve trickery and misleading wording, you have to be absolutely spot on with the wording of your challenge, or it can be legitimately cheated. Here's an example where Johnny got it wrong:

Find a fluted glass and a large and a small coin; say a 5p and a 10p. Place both coins in the glass, so the larger coin lies flat and over the small coin. Your impossible task: can you get the small coin out, without touching either coin.

The solution given is relatively complex and not something you may think of (and it wouldn't work with the kind of flutes I have). But the book misses the obvious one. Pick up the glass and tip the coins out. You have got the smaller coin out without touching either coin. There's nothing in the problem statement that says that the larger coin has to stay in the glass.

This is a rarity, though, and many of the mental challenges and puzzles (mostly they don't involve something physical like this) are genuinely entertaining. If you have friends and relations who enjoy a bit of head-scratching fun, this is the present for them. See at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com - also on Kindle at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

A farewell to Jobs

2011-10-06T08:35:00.000+01:00

It's very sad news that Steve Jobs has died. There will be plenty of pieces posted saying how wonderful he was, how visionary and how unique. And that's fine. He did some amazing things, and in the last few years has transformed Apple from a quirky personal computer manufacturer into the ultimate designer of personal electronic accessories. But I want to consider one point that is unlikely to be brought up in the eulogies that rightly will follow his death. How much he owed Apple's current success to John Sculley.

In 1985 - just one year after the Mac was launched - Jobs was forced out of Apple, as the company headed for crisis. The man behind this was Sculley, brought in from Pepsi to make Apple a more commercial operation. At the time Jobs was pushing Apple towards producing high end UNIX technical workstations. He would set up the not-particularly-successful NEXT computer company to produce the machine he thought Apple should be making. (The only time I've ever seen Jobs do his black turtleneck spiel on stage was at the launch of NEXT in the UK.) NEXT wasn't a total flop, but it wasn't a burning success either, and it was when the company was bought by Apple that Jobs came back to the fold in 1996.

Under Sculley, Apple was to produce one product and one vision that for me are absolutely the seeds of the iPhone and the iPad. Sculley's pet product was the Newton, a touchscreen personal digital assistant. It had problems, particularly with its text recognition, but it was a truly interesting product. Even better, though, was the 1987 concept video, Knowledge Navigator. This, without doubt, set the direction that would eventually produce the iPad. At the time I was blown away - and I still think the concept video is great (see below).

Now I suspect this period is going to be almost airbrushed out of Apple's history, but it's crucial. The really innovative ideas came when Jobs wasn't there, though I don't want to underplay the vast contribution he made in adding the detail and crucially the design orientation that made iPhone and iPad what they are today. I very much want to celebrate Steve Jobs' wonderful work in the history of ICT - but lets not forget the roots of that work either.

Don't blame TV for the cult of celebrity

2011-10-05T08:06:00.000+01:00

Not the picture in question. But
a good one - whoever painted it.

We often hear moaning about how TV has exposed us to the cult of celebrity, where people are valued simply for being famous, not for what they produce or perform. I think it's very short sighted to blame TV - the real culprit is the traditional arts, which no doubt would snootily blame TV, but actually started this cult of celebrity long before Logie Baird came on the scene.

Take a point of example. We have recently heard that a 'fake' picture allegedly by Leonardo da Vinci could be real. If this is the case, the picture, which last sold for £14,000 'could be worth millions.' Now either this is a great work of art or it isn't. If it's great, it should be worth a lot of money. If it's not, it shouldn't. Why does it matter whose name is attached to it? That's just a matter of celebrity, as much as paying money for the rights to Kerry Katona's latest exploits. Who made the picture is irrelevent to whether or not it's a great work of art.

It's the same with music. Whether a piece is by Mozart (say) or one of his less famous contemporaries, it shouldn't make any difference - merely how good it is. Anything else is just idiocy riding on the back of celebrity.

Note this doesn't say there's anything wrong with expecting something interesting from paintings by Leonardo because he's a great artist. That's just like wanting to read the latest book by your favourite author. It makes sense. But when it comes to the value of an individual painting that should stand alone. After all, even the best author can produce a turkey, and the best book you've ever read could be by a new author.

Behold, the cult of celebrity in its worst possible form - and it's the art world that keeps it going.

Image from Wikipedia

Date me, I can explain general relativity

2011-10-04T08:25:00.000+01:00

I was browsing through the pages of that excellent magazine, New Scientist, when I noticed this advert for 'New Scientist Connect'. Yes, now scientists have their own dating site where lovers of geeks and nerds can browse for a hot postdoc (with or without marshmallows).

I first became aware of this kind of thing a while ago when Classic FM started advertising a service called something like classic duets. (Geddit? Duets, classical music? Oh, for goodness sake.) I suspect they got too many complaints from people who thought it was a site to listen to, well, classical duets, not a dating site. But now it goes from strength to strength as Classic FM Romance.(It's interesting that the URL format of the two sites is similar. Surely it couldn't be the same company behind them?!)

I suppose the concept has some merits. You would know you had an interest in common. Or maybe not. Perhaps on the 'opposites attract' theory, New Scientist Connect is mostly browsed by beauty therapists and professional footballers.

It does make me wonder whether there also sites for, say, traffic wardens to get together (after all, who else could love them), or the Dawkins GeneSplice site where aggressive atheists can spend their time slagging off everyone else. And for that matter I also wonder who designed this ad, and really thought that someone dressed as Biggles, running across snow carrying a toy plane typified an attractive scientist...

Get your act together, Volkswagen

2011-10-03T08:22:00.000+01:00

The naming of cars is an important and serious business. The sort of thing that pushes Jeremy Clarkson and his Top Gear buddies to the realms of ecstasy. Which is why I wonder about the sanity of those in charge at car manufacturer Volkswagen. It seems they name their models by picking nouns that look interesting out of a foreign language (i.e. English) dictionary.

They are so random in their selection.

For example, there's:

the one named after a dog-related wild animal, (Fox/Lupo),
the pair named after hit-ball-with-stick games (Polo/Golf),
the one named after a wind (Sirocco),
the one named after a spelling mistake (Passat),
the one named after an Essex girl (Sharan)

and a couple that are so boring I can't even remember what they're called.

Come on, Volkswagen. You can do better than this. A five-year-old can do better than this...

Image from Wikipedia

Entrepreneurial rhubarb

2011-09-30T09:10:00.009+01:00

I was listening to some Labour shadow minister on the radio. 'The biggest obstacle to people setting up their own businesses is lack of capital,' he said. Utter rhubarb. The biggest obstacle that prevents most people setting up their own business is that they don't really want to start their own business. Certainly not enough to put the time, effort and money in. They want someone to give them a job. And that's fine. But Labour shouldn't imagine there are millions of people who would be entrepreneurs if they only had that startup capital.

Now you may say, 'They do need some money,' and that's true. But it's often not the case that you need huge capital investment to start a business. Need a computer? - the price of 10 cigarettes a day will cover it. Need a website? - easily covered by the cost of a basic Sky subscription. Both expenditure that many people looking for jobs these days would consider part of everyday life.

To be honest, I also get more than a little narked by the way governments of all colours disregard people who just get on with it and earn a living self-employed or running their own company, without necessarily employing other people. You'd think the only good company is one that employs others. Yet there are millions of us beavering away, making money for the country, gaining exports, paying taxes, all without ever employing anyone else, or wanting to. Joining this forgotten army, starting your own business, doesn't have to depend on a huge injection of capital - this is a myth that seems to depend as much on Dragon's Den as it does good economics. There are plenty of ways to take a little ingenuity and very little cash and earn a living.

Let me stress, I'm not saying everyone who is unemployed should start their own business. It's not for everyone, and I accept that. But we would do a lot better making it more attractive in tax terms to work for yourself, even if you don't employ others, that worrying so much about startup capital.

Come back ammonia, all is forgiven

2011-09-29T08:56:00.001+01:00

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again. We're off to visit the compound that hair dye manfacturers delight in telling their customers isn't in a particular product. Because it's not the most beautiful of smells, reminiscent of the farmyard and animal houses at the zoo.

Yes, it's ammonia. Smelly - and yet it's a chemical that is made in vast quantities every year for fertiliser and other uses. Any idea where the name comes from? It's a back formation that links camel dung and the temple of an ancient Egyptian god. Which turns up in Chaucer. Take a listen...

Identity theft blues

2011-09-28T10:04:00.000+01:00

I have been the victim of a really shoddy bit of identity theft. Let me explain. A few days ago in the post I received two statements from a mail order company, one for more than £500 worth of goods, the other for more than £300. I had never bought anything from them in my life.

I rang them up and it seems that someone had managed to slip through their anything but rigorous security checks. I'm really amazed that the company in question didn't have systems that could spot that this was a fradulent activity. They did a credit check on me to see if it was okay, but there were so many oddities in the application that it's bizarre nothing was flagged up. After all:

Two accounts were set up for the same address (mine) on the same day
One was for a Ms B Clegg, the other a Mr D Clegg, so neither matched me exactly for the credit check
The date of birth given was wrong - again something the credit check should have picked up
Two orders were place, each using up most of the credit, each going to a different delivery address, not my address. One in Middlesex one in the midlands. Not suspicious, guys?
The kind of order was not typical. These were orders for lots and lots of relatively low price items like T-shirts, not for big money goods

It wouldn't exactly take top flight artificial intelligence software to spot there was something strange. Don't get me wrong, the company was very good about it, assuring me that they would sort it all out - but they seem to be very casual about giving away around £1,000 of credit.

The one good thing that came out of this, apart from having a topic for a blog post, is that at the company's suggestion I did a check on myself with one of the credit checking agencies, something I've been meaning to do for ages, and it was fascinating, though it emphasized even more how much incorrect data the mail order company was ignoring. Also it's interesting that when we hear 'identity theft', we think 'internet' - but in fact this was good old fashioned basic personal information misuse that could have been done without a computer in sight.

Faster than light neutrinos

2011-09-27T10:08:00.000+01:00

The first sighting of a neutrino, only 41 years ago

Oh, wow. Physics is in the news. Just for once someone at CERN other than the LHC teams has made the headlines. It seems some neutrinos have been measured moving faster than light. I have seen headlines saying 'Einstein's theory shattered!' or similar. This is baloney. Here's the reality.

Neutrinos are particles produced in nuclear reactions that are almost impossible to detect. Every second about 50 trillion neutrinos pass through your body as they pour out of the Sun. They aren't exactly obvious. Neutrinos can be detected, but only indirectly as a very small percentage of them will interact with matter - what you see is that interaction, not the neutrino itself. It's telling that when a picture was taken of the Sun using neutrinos, the Sun was the other side of the the Earth at the time. Most neutrinos zip through the Earth as if it's not there.

In the CERN experiment neutrinos were sent down a 732 kilometre tunnel, and the timing was out by a matter of 0.00000006 seconds, making it seem that they went very, very slightly faster than light. This, then, is the evidence that is being presented and that has produced statements like this from the BBC:

The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

It's really interesting, but I don't think it's earth shattering. The chances are, this is experimental error. Although the experiment has been repeated around 1500 times, it was using the same setup and assumptions. They've only got to get the length of the beam wrong by a tiny amount, for example, for the whole thing to be a mistake. And there is other evidence, comparing neutrinos and light from a cosmic source where there is no such disparity - so there is already some contradictory evidence.

However, even if it is true, the BBC's version is simply wrong. Modern physics doesn't depend on nothing exceeding light speed. We're talking about special relativity here, which is the basis of some modern physics, but light speed being a limit is a consequence of that theory, not a starting point. In fact we already have well established experiments in which particles travel faster than light speed.

This is a consequence of quantum mechanical tunnelling. One of the strange aspects of quantum physics is that particles don't have an absolute location, just a probability of being in various places. This means that particles can jump through an obstacle without passing through the space in between.

This sounds like something obscure and unusual, but it's actually how the Sun (or any other star) works. For nuclear fusion to take place, positively charged protons have to be pushed incredibly close together. So close that even the temperatures and pressures in the Sun aren't enough to get it going. The Sun only works because every second billions of particles tunnel through the barrier of the repulsion and fuse.

That same tunnelling technique has been used to send particles faster than light. All the evidence is that there is zero tunnelling time. A tunnelling particle literally doesn't travel through the space in between. So if you imagine a particle going 1 centimetre at the speed of light, tunnelling 1 centimetre instantly and going a further centimetre at the speed of light, it will have traversed the entire distance at 1.5c - one and half times the speed of light.

I'm not saying this is what is happening in the neutrino experiment, but I do imagine it is going to be something similar. Not a collapse of special relativity, just a way around it. If it's not experimental error, which still seems most likely. Special relativity has been tested so many times and has always delivered. GPS satellites have to be corrected for it, or they'd get more and more inaccurate. Particles demonstrate it in experiments every day. As far as I'm concerned, special relativity is solid as a rock.

Heavy handed supermarket?

2011-09-26T09:20:00.000+01:00

I was, to say the least, shocked to read a piece on the Guardian website where a journalist describes being approached in a Tesco supermarket while writing down the price of a bottle of water. The assistant manager apparently told him: 'You're not allowed to do that. It's illegal.' When the journalist was then faced with the manager, he was told 'Look, it's company policy, you're not allowed to do it.'

I found this absolutely bizarre. Clearly it's not illegal. Of course they can decide they don't want you to do something in their shop and ask you to leave if they don't like what you are doing, but you are not breaking the law. But could it really be company policy that you aren't allowed to write prices down?

I emailed Tesco, and this was their response:

Please be assured it is not company policy to stop customers, or journalists, checking or writing down prices in our stores. We have contacted the journalist in question to apologise and we're looking into this to ensure it doesn't happen again. As I'm sure you're aware, our prices are displayed on our website so are readily available for all our customers to compare with others, if they wish to do so.

While the final sentence is irrelevent (as website prices aren't necessarily reflected in stores, especially Tesco Local or Metro or whatever they call it), the Customer Service Executive who contacted me makes it clear that it is not company policy to stop people from writing down prices. This seemed likely to be the case, though it makes you wonder why the store manager didn't know company policy. And for that matter, why he thought that the company would have any objection to people writing down prices.

Am I human?

2011-09-23T08:12:00.001+01:00

A not-chatbot

I hear that at the Techniche Festival (whatever that is) in Guwahati, India, a chatbot finally beat the Turing test (sort of). A chatbot is a bit of software that emulates human conversation, while the Turing test is supposed to show that if an artificial intelligence can fool you into thinking your are typing to a human, then the technology has finally come of age.

In the test 30 volunteers typed conversations, half with a human, half with a chatbot. Then an audience of 1334 people (including the volunteers) voted on which was which. A total of 59% thought Cleverbot was human, making the organisers (and New Scientist) claim it had passed the Turing test.

By comparison 63% of the voters thought the human participants were human. This can be a bit embarrassing for human participants who are thought to be a computer (there's rather a nice description of taking part in this process in the book The Most Human Human).

I don't think this is really a success under the Turing test. First, they only have a 4 minute chat, which gives chatbot designers an opportunity to use short-term tactics that wouldn't work in a real extended conversation, which I envisage is what Turing had in mind. And then there's the location of the event. A key piece of information that is missing is how many of the voters had English as a first language. If, as I suspect, many of the voters did not, or spoke English with distinctly different idioms, their ability to spot which was human and which wasn't would inevitably be compromised.

See what you think. You can chat to Cleverbot yourself here.

Picture from Wikipedia

The joy of car insurance

2011-09-22T10:12:00.000+01:00

When new parents moan about the cost of having a baby – buying a push chair and a car seat and a cot and so on – I nod sagely and hide a knowing smile. ‘Just wait,’ I am thinking, ‘until that baby is 17.’

For non-UK readers, 17 is the age at which our young are let loose on the road in cars. Even if you manage to resist the constant nagging to buy a car (‘Everyone else’s parents are buying them cars. Why are you too tight to buy me a car? It’s not fair!’), the expense and organization involved with making this happen is phenomenal.

First there’s getting a provisional licence. Then the wallet-sapping experience of driving lessons. Tests to pay for and arrange, of course (though you can now book these online – but always go to the direct.gov.uk site, there are rip-off sites that charge a fee). And did anyone mention insurance? Still, it’s all worth it when they pass the test, rip up the L-plates (more expense) and you can see the smile on their faces. Well, no, it’s not really worth it – but there is the consolation of not having to drive them all over the place any more. There’s just the matter of forking out for petrol, servicing and, yes, even more insurance.

Still, once they get to this stage you can relax, and this is exactly what we did with the daughter who has passed her test. Until the day we got the call saying, was it okay, she just wanted to drive down to Bristol. Okay, fine. Some trepidation. But it wasn’t until a little later that a horrible thought occurred to us. What if she broke down? Because we had thought we’d arranged everything, but not breakdown cover. High speed resorting to the internet and a few minutes later she had this too.

Please don’t tell me if I’ve forgotten anything else. I really don’t want to know. But excuse me next time someone tells me how much you have to sort out with a baby if I burst into hysterical laughter.

The lottery insight

2011-09-21T09:17:00.002+01:00

A while ago I mentioned how those who criticize people who enter the National Lottery as stupid individuals that don't understand probability miss the point, because it's a relatively low investment you can forget about, in return for quite a lot of pleasure occasionally when you do win something.

We can also use the mechanism of a lottery to explore how human beings get their gratification.

One of the UK's National Lottery games is called Thunderball. The player has to choose 5 numbers between 1 and 39, and a sixth number between 1 and 14. The maximum prize for matching all six is £500,000, while you get £3 for just matching the Thunderball.

Imagine two strategies, both costing £14. One is to play the same set of numbers each week for 14 weeks. The other is to play 14 lines on a single night, using all the numbers between 1 and 39, shuffled, to populate the first 5 (you would have to do this nearly twice), and sequential numbers from 1 to 14 as the Thunderball.

Most people, I think would prefer to have 1 go a week for 14 weeks, rather than blow it all on one week. Yet the second strategy is the better of the two in terms of being certain to win. Both strategies have the same chance of winning the jackpot. But the second strategy ensures you win a minimum of £3, and that you are guaranteed to match at at least five of your numbers. The first strategy could go through the whole 14 weeks and never have a single match. (Admittedly, it's slightly more complicated than this, as in principle with the first strategy you could win 14 times, where with the second, your maximum number of wins is likely to be 3. But the fact remains that one is a certainty and the other isn't.)

What this shows, I think, is that the primary enjoyment value of the lottery is anticipation. The first strategy gives you 14 nights when you could be a winner. ('It could be you!' as the slogan goes.) The second strategy only gives you one night. So even though the chances of winning something are better, it will tend to be less attractive.

Whatever happened to climate change?

2011-09-20T08:56:00.000+01:00

A few years ago I wrote a couple of books on green topics (Ecologic and The Global Warming Survival Kit) -and the timing was terrible.

In the first place, after selling a storm, people suddenly stopped buying books on climate change. I think initially it was exciting and scary - but then it began to feel hopeless, and you don't want to read about hopelessness. Secondly, the financial crash and recession hit. You can protest as much as you like that our financial problems don't make climate change go away, but they certainly make it easy to ignore.

Here's the thing. I don't think we're going to do much about climate change until things get fairly dire for a sizeable chunk of the world. We're lucky in Europe that we won't get much of the really bad impacts at that stage. But a lot of people may suffer. And I also suspect that as much as possible, we are going to invent our way out of the problem, rather than go backwards and stop doing things - and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, whether green hairshirted types like it or not, despite the 'dark satanic mills', things are a lot better now for the vast majority of people than they were in the green, bucolic medieval times. Because we invented our way out of it.

Some claim this means we should give up even trying to be green. I don't agree. There's no harm in slowing things down. It gives us more time to invent our way out. But if I'm really, really honest, most of the green things I do have an ulterior motive. So, for example:

I recycle - but this means I don't run out of room in the wheelie bin
I don't fly - but this is because I don't like flying, and I did enough to last a lifetime when I was at BA
I drive a small, low emissions car - but if I won £10 million on the lottery tomorrow, I would be off down to the Aston Martin showroom before you could say 'Jeremy Clarkson'
I use low energy bulbs, have a well insulated house and all that - because I'm tight and want to save on fuel costs
I walk to the shops rather than drive - to save money, because I hate faffing about in busy car parks and for my health

So, please do keep being green. Keep doing good things. But maybe it's time we got a little more realistic.

Punk Rock People Management

2011-09-19T08:08:00.001+01:00

One of the joys of doing occasional training in creativity is that I get to meet some great people, and one of the most remarkable I've had the pleasure of working alongside is Peter Cook. Peter combines business training and rock music (not always at the same time) - can't be bad.

He has just come out with a book on managing people (primarily from an HR perspective), taking what he describes as a punk rock approach. You've got to love it for the cover alone. Inside, he takes key areas of dealing with staff and gives them a serious working over. Often the 'punk rock' approach involves stripping out all the fancy stuff and getting back to basics, which is why the chapters are just double page spreads. Frankly a lot of this stuff is much simpler than HR professionals would have you believe - and Punk Rock People Managment is excellent at showing where the Emperor's New Clothes are in action.

The best news is that, at the moment the book is free in PDF format. I downloaded it to my iPad where it was an easy read in Apple's ebook reader. But if you don't fancy an ebook, you can also buy a solid version.

If you have to manage people, it's well worth taking a look. It's not as transformative as Ricardo Semler's Maverick, which I think is just about the best business book ever written, but there's a lot of common sense and cutting away the deadwood.

And did I mention it's free?

Free books and moral dilemmas

2011-09-16T08:38:00.000+01:00


Yes, one book in the whole of the UK. And what a surprise, it's in London.

I was interested to read about the Guardian's attempt to get us all leaving books all over the place for other people to find. Apparently they've conned 15,000 copies out of publishers which they (what, just the Guardian staff?) are going to leave randomly about the place, and they are encouraging the rest of us to do likewise. You can even download a special bookplate to paste into your book for the purposes.

What's more there's a funky map showing where all the books have been left or found, though when I looked it only had one book on it, left by the Guardian's literary editor (Gormenghast, how... literary).

I really can't make up my mind if this is:

A very good idea that will encourage people to read more
Going to result in lots of people (e.g. staff in a cafe where you leave a book/street cleaners) picking up books as rubbish and binning them
A typical wishy-washy Guardian idea that's great fun (isn't it, Jacinda?) and totally pointless

The trouble is, if I took part, and if I could resist giving a book I wrote away, my inclination would be to give a book I really hate. After all, the books I love I want to keep and read again. And then I would have to lie on the bookplate and sing its praises, when really I think it's total rubbish. Do these Guardian people realize the moral dilemmas they are creating?

A new website is born

2011-09-15T08:30:00.000+01:00

Small fanfare of trumpets. I'd like to announce the arrival of a new website, www.universeinsideyou.com - like most babies, it doesn't do much at the moment. In fact it's just a placeholder really. It may gurgle occasionally, but no nappies are involved.

The website is for the followup to Inflight Science. The Universe Inside You uses your own body as a vehicle to explore everything from quantum theory to the workings of the brain.

The book won't be out until next April, but when it is published, like Inflight Science it will feature a range of experiments to try out. By putting some of these onto the website, they can be made more interactive and (hopefully) interesting.

The other thing the website will bring is links to find out more about other books where you can read more on a topic you've got a taster of in the book.This was something several reviews of Inflight Science said would be useful.

For the moment, though, it's just an opportunity to take a better look at the cover than the small version above. I rather like the cover - it matches the cover of the new paperback version of Inflight Science, out on 5 January, of which there's a sneak preview below:

Ooh, I just had a McGurk moment

2011-09-14T08:59:00.000+01:00

I'm currently reading for review Brain Bugs (my fingers wanted to type Brian Bugs, hmm) by Dean Buonomano. (I'll link to the review when it's available.) This is an exploration of the human brain, using the things it gets wrong as a way of understanding it better.

On mental glitch it mentions is the McGurk effect. This is well known, so you may have come across it already, but if you haven't, it's a great one. What it demonstrates is the way that the brain's processing of sensory information can result in us receiving a false impression of what's going on.

Take a look at the video below. It's important you have the sound on, as I want you to see what the guy says.

Now replay the video, but this time, close your eyes as soon as you click the replay button and listen the sound of the whole clip without the picture.

It's exactly the same video, and exactly the same sound 'Ba ba, ba ba, ba ba.' But when your eyes see the lips forming the 'Da da' sound, your brain gives more weight to your eyes than your ears and translates the electrical impulses from your ears as 'Da da' instead of 'Ba ba.' Try it watching the video again. You can't force yourself to hear 'Ba ba' even though you know that's what he is saying.

Yet another excellent example of the way our senses don't provide us with a video camera like snapshot of what is out there, but rather the brain's interpretation of what it thinks is happening. Excellent!

Welcome back, Mr Galton

2011-09-13T08:12:00.000+01:00


Nothing to do with eugenics, but a note by Francis Galton that messed up Eadweard Muybridge's career

I was recently reading for review Lone Frank's interesting book on gene tests and their implications, My Beautiful Genome. It makes a point that really hadn't occured to me before, raised in a discussion between Ms Frank and Armand Leroi, the author of another interesting human biology book, Mutants. And it concerns the dark side of genetics.

Many aspects of science have their dark sides. Nuclear physics - wonderful... nuclear bombs - not so wonderful. Similarly, genetics has transformed biology, but its dark side is eugenics, the brainchild of Victorian scientist Francis Galton.

Eugenics has a kind of logic, but most people find it distasteful. The idea is that genes alone should be enough to determine who will have the best children, and so you should use genes to determine who should breed and who shouldn't. (That's a vast oversimplification, but it gives a flavour.)

What Leroi pointed out to Frank is that despite the fact that eugenics is a dirty word, we operate a kind of neo-eugenics, that is generally not regarded as a problem unless it is given that loaded name. Thousands of abortions are carried out every year of fetuses that have some detected defect, physical or genetic. What is this if it's not a kind of eugenics?

I think what this illustrates is the important consideration that labels are not good ways of making decisions. 'Eugenics' as a label comes will all sorts of baggage, and at its worst, the concept is despicable. But the fact remains most people are comfortable with the process described above. Applying moral decisions to science and technology is rarely a black and white process, and should never be based on labels alone.

Coming over all boustrophedon

2011-09-12T08:12:00.001+01:00

Awful cover - I much prefer
the older one

I was reading an old Morse book at the weekend to have a break from science. Specifically Service of All the Dead. This is not my favourite of Colin Dexter's novels. The plot is ridiculously unlikely. And the attitude to homosexuality (pretty well equated with paedophilia) and women ('You're a pretty little thing,' being a commonplace and inoffensive sort of comment) seems more 1960s than 1979 when the book was written. But it did get me thinking.

Specifically, at one point Morse is searching a church and Dexter says he does this boustrophedon. My immediate reaction was to think he was showing off, and this was a classic example of using a word many people didn't know just for the sake of it. As it happens I did know what it meant. It was originally a form of writing where, having reached the end of the line, the writer starts the next line at the same end, writing the next line backwards. Then starts at the usual end again and writes forwards. And so on. The term comes from the way parallel furrows are ploughed (by an ox).

Thinking Dexter was showing off, I thought 'Why didn't he just say that Morse zig-zagged up and down the pews?' This would certainly be easier to understand. But on giving it a bit more thought, to be fair to Dexter, it's not quite the same thing. A zig-zag should be like the letter Z, with the connecting back movement at an angle. You don't do that with ploughing or writing, and you can't do that if, like Morse, you are constrained by church pews. Technically you have to go boustrophedon.

So here's the dilemma. I still think Dexter was showing off, and I still think that it's not a good idea to use words most people don't understand (and all but a tiny fraction won't bother to look up). This reduces your ability as a writer to communicate. Yet at the same time, it was, without doubt, the right word. I think maybe I would have engineered some way for Lewis to calling it zig-zagging, so Morse could correct him and introduce the proper term. But I can't really falt Colin Dexter for using the word that does the job best.

See Service of All the Dead at Amazon.co.uk and at Amazon.com

Ideas and books

2011-09-09T08:58:00.001+01:00

I love being an author. There's very little about it (apart from writing proposals) that I don't enjoy. And one of my favourite things is talking to people about writing, science and (yes, sorry) my books. I'm happy to discuss practically anything. But there's one subject of conversation that comes up all too regularly that does make me wince just the tiniest bit. It goes something like this:

Them: 'You write books, don't you?'
Me: (Slightly embarrassed, but pleased): 'Yes.'
Them: 'I know what your next book should be about.'
Me: 'Well, actually...'
Them (Getting warmed up): 'I've got this great idea for a book, you see. You should write a book for children, make it a story, but put science in it, and...'

You get the picture. If I'm really lucky they will then say something like 'But if you use my idea, I expect my cut of the royalties!' Hmm.

The truth of the matter is that having ideas for books is really not a problem - at least I don't find it to be. I have a list of book ideas as long as your arm, tucked away on OneNote on my computer. I probably add to it about once a week. But the fact is, most of them will not get turned into books. If I am looking for a topic, on second examination, in the cold light of day, many of them will be so-so at best. Those that still do seem good will need a considerable amount of working over, then I have to sell them to a publisher (sadly, they don't leap on every idea I come up with as if it were manna from heaven), and there's also the teeny matter of writing the book.

I am quite happy with my ideas (and those of publishers, who sometimes suggest a cracker). If someone has a great idea for a book, why not write it themselves? By the time they've worked at it a couple of months, perhaps they will revise their thoughts on it. Or perhaps they will write a great book.

It's not that I don't appreciate the thought. But, really, getting great ideas is by far the easiest part of being an author. So I'm happy to hear an idea, but I'm pretty unlikely to do anything about it.

P.S. Apparently Katy Price defends the fact that she doesn't write 'her' books by saying 'But I did have some of the ideas for them!' Nuff said.

Farewell incandescent light bulb, we shall miss you

2011-09-08T08:14:00.000+01:00

As the 60 watt bulb follows its 100 watt cousin into European illegality it's time to say a fond farewell to a light bulb that has kept our houses lit for over120 years. Admittedly the filament went from being carbon to tungsten, but this was a matter of tweaking and subtlety, not a huge change in the design.

If you ask the famous man in the street (that one, standing on the corner) who invented the electric light bulb, he would probably say Thomas Edison, as would many pub quizmasters. But they would be wrong. It's certainly true that in 1879 Edison produced an electric light bulb after much fiddling around with different filaments. And he did claim to be first on the scene, but English scientist Sir Joseph William Swan had demonstrated a bulb, like Edison’s based on a carbon filament, nearly eight months earlier.

Swan, much less of a businessman, hadn’t bothered with the level of patent applications that Edison had. Nor had he the same cutthroat commercial sense. Edison’s reaction to the news of Swan’s invention was to launch a patent infringement prosecution.

Patent law often seems to favor the commercially strong rather than the most original thinker, but in this case Swan’s earlier invention was recognized by the court and Edison failed. As part of the court settlement, Edison was obliged to recognize Swan’s independent and earlier invention and to set up a joint company, the Edison and Swan United Electric Light Company, to exploit the incandescent bulb.

Rumbunctious beginnings, then for the humble incandescent light bulb. But still an invention who passing we can mark with a certain sadness.

Picture from Wikipedia