REVISIT SERIES -  An edited post from October 2009 Some of the old posts I'm revisiting are merely still interesting (hopefully), but I was surprised to see as far back as 2009 that the impact of social media on the spread of news and views was already clear, even if I perhaps underplayed the negatives. It's also notable as I had totally forgotten about this story in writing my new book,   Brainjacking , out next month, which very much picks up on the way the ability of storytelling to inform, influence and manipulate has been amplified by technology, from writing through to AI. There has been much comment  and complaint  in the electronic world as a result of  Jan Moir's unpleasant Daily Mail article  about the death of  Stephen Gately . What I found most fascinating was how out of touch Moir was in her response to the wave of complaint that surged around the internet like a tsunami. She described this as a 'heavily orchestrated internet campaign.' This shows a mag

When I wrote my first popular science book, Light Years , I got some lovely reviews - and one or two stinkers. I asked my editor if I should respond to the negative remarks. She said 'Definitely not - unless the review contains something that's factually untrue, you only do yourself damage by attempting to put straight what is, in the end, an opinion.' This is an attitude I've stuck with through thick and thin. Since then I have also reviewed many hundreds of books. I have only twice had an author or publisher kick back against a negative review. One was of an adult colouring book (a genre, I confess, I detest - I ought to stress I didn't ask for a review copy, I was sent it unsolicited), where the author felt that, as an author myself, I was letting the side down - we've all got to earn a living. I did, as a result, remove my review from Amazon. The other has just happened - and the response was not just a moan. Either an author or the publisher put in a DMCA

I was amused to read on the BBC News site  ‘ Get ready for a cosmic surprise this autumn - Earth is about to get a second moon, according to scientists.’ I named my first science quiz book How Many Moons does the Earth Have? precisely because of this kind of silliness. My answer was ‘one’ and it still will be while a chunk of passing rock is briefly caught by Earth’s gravitational pull. Apart from anything, the suggestion that something is a moon just because it is briefly pulled off track by a planet’s gravity seems to reflect an underlying misunderstanding of how gravity works. Everything with mass distorts spacetime and causes moving objects to be displaced from their natural straight line path. This would make practically everything in space a moon if you took this argument to its limit, because they are all being pulled of track by the planets. The news item is also amusing because back in 2013, the TV show QI claimed that the Earth had a large number of moons (it was QI’s variou

REVISIT SERIES -  An edited post from September 2009 The white goods company Electrolux has been running a lab design competition to come up with designs for domestic appliances for 2099 (apparently, in 2009 Electrolux was 90 years old). There were eight finalists who came up with various unlikely possibilities, of which the most fruit-cakey are the two I have included here. I'm all in favour of designers being given a bit of free rein with creativity if they then refine to reality, but there seems to be a problem with the criteria used to select these designs. Two essentials are missing. Scientific practicality - would this be feasible in 90 years time? - and practical relevance. An obvious question to ask, surely, is who would want a domestic appliance that does this? Each of these 'novel' ideas falls down at one of these hurdles. The first, shown at the top of the page, is a teleporting fridge. According to designer Dulyawat Wongnawa:  Technologies seem to be progressing

While some from the arts or educated in the humanities proclaim a profound disinterest in science, most scientists have an interest in the arts. However, sometimes scientists go too far in trying to appear art-friendly or to make arty types feel loved. One of the most egregious examples of this recently has been the attempt to claim that Vincent van Gogh had a deep and intuitive understanding of fluid dynamics. Last Wednesday's Times newspaper dedicated more than half a page to this bizarre suggestion. According to article-writer Rhys Blakely, a study of one of van Gogh's most famous paintings, The Starry Night 'suggests he also had an uncanny grasp of some of the most elusive laws of physics.' No he didn't. The idea from this study , lead author Dr Yongxiang Huang of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is that the swirly bits in van Gogh's painting are 'not randomly placed' but rather 'follow patterns that appear at just the right di

Some of my favourite pieces of music are variations (or variants) on a theme. Unlike a pop cover version, these aren’t just a different arrangement of the same song, but rather the composer takes a snippet of music, often by someone else and go off in all sorts of directions. My personal favourite is the Ralph Vaughan Williams piece Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (it’s a fantasia because it’s a looser continuous form referencing the original, rather than a set of separate variations, but in essence it's the same kind of thing). The original is a rather staid (though beautiful) hymn tune, but Vaughan Williams takes it to amazing new heights. I was therefore rather disappointed listening to composer Debbie Wiseman talking about her Paralympic homecoming piece I 'm Walking with You (played beautifully by a blind pianist called Lucy - I don't think she's called 'Lucy the pianist' as the image seems to suggest, I think she featured in a TV show called The Piani