In my previous post I looked at why I don't like the way organic food makes dubious claims for its products. In this I want to uncover the way its rules are based more on magic than sense. There is no doubt that organics had a flaky origin, based more on mysticism than any real understanding of agriculture. In itself this isn't disastrous. Medicine's history is also flaky, based more on mysticism than any real understanding of how the body works, and we've shaken that off (mostly). But organics has kept too much of its mystical past, buried in the rules and regulations that organic farmers have to follow. Here are four examples. The EU tried to ban the fungicide copper sulphate, which is known to be more environmentally damaging than many alternatives. The ban was postponed because of lobbying by organic groups – they like copper sulphate because it’s traditional . All too often organic standards are not about what's best, but about what we've always don...

CAM - complementary and alternative medicine - is taking quite a battering at the moment. The forces of rationality have seen a UK parliament committee recommend that we don't waste NHS money on homeopathy , while the chiropracters have seen their attempt to use libel law to suppress criticism by Simon Singh collapse . At the same time, Prince Charles' foundation to try to impose alternative medicine on the health service is in trouble . So perhaps this isn't the best time to liken organic food to complementary and alternative medicine. But I think it's something we ought to do. This isn't a direct comparison. Organic food is usually good food, where CAM is not good medicine. But the organic movement uses many of the approaches of the alternative bunch, to its detriment. In this post and the next I want to look at two ways organics parallels CAM - in the second I will be looking at the way it depends on magic rather than science. In this first post, I want to l...

Way back in November I pointed out that my home town of Swindon was rolling out free public WiFi across the borough, which I thought was rather neat. It meant I had to speak up against those who were convinced they would not be able to go out of the house without it frying their brains - but it seemed really handy. Not only would it be a benefit when you're out and about in Swindon, it should also help areas that don't have cable and have very poor internet connections through the telephone network. Since then I hadn't heard anything more - but revelations were to start rolling when I attended a Swindon version of Question Time for candidates for the two parliamentary seats. It seems there have been big delays in rolling out the access. And worse, the Conservative-led council seems to have got itself in a real mess. Going against any common sense, they apparently awarded the contract for what was a major undertaking to a small, new company - and even loaned the compan...

Why won't you find me in any of the world's 50 best restaurants? Because I'm too tight. But that apart, when I heard on the radio this morning that the 2010 'World's 50 best restaurants' award winner had been announced, I couldn't help think 'SO WHAT?' Yes, I thought it in capitals. (The awards' website is here , but seems a bit flaky - there's a little bit about it from the BBC here .) Part of the problem I have with this award is that the chances are high I will never experience anything in the list. I certainly won't find myself at the #1 restaurant, Noma in Copenhagen , and I'm highly unlikely ever to cross the threshold of Britain's top spot, which is Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck at Bray coming in at a respectable #3. Compare this with an awards ceremony that's faintly interesting like the Oscars or one of the book prizes. It's highly likely that I will experience at least some of the contenders there. That...

I apologise if you've come to this post expecting to see those 50 ways listed out - you won't, but read on, you will still find it worthwhile. I've been sent for review a copy of the book, 50 Ways to Make Google love your Website (see at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com ). It's an intriguing prospect. Google remains the dominant force for driving business to a website. I've just taken a quick look on the stats of where visitors to this blog came from and out of the top 20 sources, sixteen are Google searches. (The others were one Bing search (go Microsoft!), my website , my Twitter feed and someone else's site - thanks for the link!) Most of us know that Google uses a complex algorithm for deciding how to rank pages in its search results, and we all want to get higher in that listing, because we know that if you aren't in the top few, chances are you won't get clicked on. (I'm pleased to say I'm winning the "brian clegg" search at t...

It's not long since I last mentioned feng shui , but it's pure coincidence that it has come up twice in my general attempt to stress the rational over the irrational - consider it a cluster . As before, it has become a topic because it has intruded into my life without me asking, in this case in the form of the advert from Facebook pictured on the right. I have to confess, the advertising on Facebook can be particularly pathetic. It tries hard to make use of information gleaned from your profile, but does so in such a hamfisted way that it make you chuckle, rather than rush to click through. So you (or rather I, because you aren't so ancient) will get an advert saying, SPECIAL OFFER FOR 54-YEAR-OLD PEOPLE! Yeah, right. And there isn't a bit of code that reads something like 'Print SPECIAL OFFER FOR {Field: age}-YEAR-OLD PEOPLE!' Any road up, this morning up popped the offending ad you see here and it set off a small burst off fireworks in my brain (not a goo...

There are times I love my job - never more so than yesterday, when I was doing some work for my next book but one, on the subject of time machines. I was thinking specifically about travelling into the future. (One thing all fictional time machines get wrong is that the mechanism for going forwards and backwards is identical. In a real time machine you need to use totally different approaches to go forwards and backwards.) In principle travelling forwards in time is a piece of cake. Everyone can do it. I've managed to travel over 50 years into the future. A day at a time. Unfortunately, unless you also discover a means to totally stop ageing, this isn't a helpful way to return to the future if you've zipped back a couple of hundred years into the past, let alone get to the year 800,000 as the movie poster promises. The rate of a second per second is just too slow. It may be possible to use biological means - effectively to sleep through the time - but this has lots of p...