Skip to main content

Science writing one hit wonders

I'm in the process of transferring the Popular Science book review site (www.popularscience.co.uk) to a new home after getting fed up with Wordpress.

The old site (about the fourth incarnation since 2004), was hosted on my own website using Wordpress, but it was a nightmare to keep up to date. They kept updating Wordpress and its plugins with nauseating regularity, and I could never get the automatic updates to work, so had to update it by hand each time. For a while it has been close to the maximum memory my ISP allocates to a virtual server, and the latest version crashed through this so that it was impossible to update the site ever again.

One advantage of moving it to a new site is that I've taken the opportunity to add a couple of features missing from the Wordpress version, notably an alphabetical set of index pages by author. And what's quite surprising is how many one hit wonders there are. If you take a look, for instance, at the S authors, one of the more popular surname initial letters, out of 51 authors, only 6 have more than one book listed. (I am still updating the site, so there may be more by the time you read this.)

One interpretation of this is that popular science writers are primarily amateurs (at writing). Another is that most aren't very good. Or are very slow writers. Or didn't earn as much as they expected. (Or hated our review and wouldn't send another book in case that one was slated too.) All of the above, I suspect, and other reasons too. But interesting nonetheless.

Incidentally, the site is up for the UK blog awards. If you've got a few moments to spare, it would be great if you could pop along and vote for it! It should only take a few seconds.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...