This is a bit of an oddity - it was given to me on the assumption that it is a mystery so I would like it, and there is a mystery element, but the main focus (and certainly the best part) involves an 87-year-old woman looking back over her life. Florence Butterfield is a woman from an ordinary background, but who has an extraordinary life, which is dipped into through her memories in a non-linear fashion. Susan Fletcher is clearly adept at this kind of writing, handling it well and giving Florrie some remarkable events to remember, through to the point when due to an unlikely accident with mulled wine she ends up losing a leg, in a wheelchair and moving into the assisted living part of a care home, where the key event of the mystery takes place at midsummer. The manager of the home, Renate, plummets from her third floor window with Florrie as the only witness. The manager's life is on a thread in a coma, and the assumption is made that it was a suicide attempt. But Florrie is not s

This is the final post on the mathematical approach known as the Monte Carlo method, following ' Generating random numbers .' We have seen in previous posts why the method is named Monte Carlo, how it was first used and the difficulties of obtaining a stream of truly random numbers. This approach is now used across the sciences, as well in engineering, economics, AI and more. It's an technique that comes in useful when there is a complex mathematical problem solve, where taking repeated random samples of weighted possible outcomes will give a better understanding of a real world situation. There are far too many applications to go into detail here (you can find a length set of possibilities in the Wikipedia entry ). To see a simple one in action, take a look at this Monte Carlo-based pi generator . But I just want to pick out another application that I'm particularly familiar with from using it to help understand queues in an airport terminal. I've always thought th

Having recently had a week with sole charge of the TV remote, I've taken the opportunity of catching up on a couple of new series in my favourite fantasy sub-genre. I'm not a fan of swords and sorcery (with the noble exception of Lord of the Rings ), but I love what you might call real-world fantasy. This is pretty much the same as urban fantasy, but doesn't have to be in a city. You could also see it as magical realism without the pretentiousness.  The idea, then, is to incorporate fantastical occurrences in the normal world. The first example of this was ITV's Passenger . This sets what should be a normal police procedural story in a weird village (Chadder Vale) in Lancashire. There are strange occurrences, some sort of unexplained dangerous creature and a cast of misfits. As such, you can see it as a mix of Twin Peaks, Stranger Things and Happy Valley . Perhaps the weirdest decision by Andrew Buchan, the man behind the series, is to set the show in the present, but

This is the third of four posts on the mathematical approach known as the Monte Carlo method, following ' Where did those neutrons go '. As we saw in the previous post, the Monte Carlo method depends on having a stream of random numbers. Unfortunately, randomness is not easy to generate. Ask someone for a series of random choices between 1 and 10 and they will not do well - for example, there won't be sufficient repeated values for a true random stream. In another extract from my book Dice World , let's take a look at what appears to be random whether we use a spreadsheet or a more sophisticated source: In Excel I have two random number functions, RAND, which gives me a random value between 0 and 1 (I just got 0.61012053) and RANDBETWEEN to choose a random number in a range. (My value for between 1 and 10 came out as 4.) Job done. Unfortunately, what Excel gives us is not random numbers, but pseudo-random numbers. Numbers that are random enough for, say, making a prize

This is the second of four posts on the mathematical approach known as the Monte Carlo method, following ' Breaking the bank...' Moving from the bank being broken at a casino to a mathematical method occurred as the Second World War came to a close. A number of scientists on the US nuclear programme were attempting to model neutron diffusion from a nuclear bomb. This was because a conventional nuclear explosion is effectively the trigger for the (then theoretical) thermonuclear explosion of a fusion bomb - and a major factor in its effectiveness is how neutrons travel out from the primary fission stage. Like his colleague John von Neumann, the Polish-American physicist Stanislaw Ulam had an interest in the game of poker and the probabilistic nature of games. The new possibility of electronic calculation using the ENIAC computer made it possible to consider a novel approach to modelling neutron diffusion. At the heart of nuclear fission is the idea of a chain reaction. A neutron

This is the first of a couple of posts on the mathematical approach known as the Monte Carlo method. I want to start gently by taking a (virtual) trip to Monte Carlo in Monaco and its famous casino, specifically to explore a once well known phrase - the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. The article below is extracted from my book Dice World . A roulette wheel is a physical device, and as such is not a perfect mechanism for producing a random number between 1 and 37 (or 38 in the more money-grabbing US casinos). Although wheels are routinely tested, it is entirely possible for one to have a slight bias – and just occasionally this can result in a chance for players to make a bundle. It certainly did so for 19th-century British engineer Joseph Jagger, who has, probably incorrectly, been associated with the song ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, which came out around the same time as Jagger had a remarkable win in Monaco. The song probably referred instead to the conman Ch

In Jo Callaghan's first book featuring Detective Superintendent Kat Frank paired up with a virtual AI detective called Lock, In the Blink of an Eye , it was arguably the science fiction aspect that came to the fore - but the (arguably better) sequel focuses more on being an excellent police procedural crime novel. Frank and Lock have been moved from cold cases to a frontline murder that rapidly becomes a national news story - the victim has been crucified. (I don't know if the release of the book was timed intentionally, but I read it over Easter.) Tension mounts as a second crucified body is found - while the team is still thrashing around trying to find a viable suspect. Where in the first book, Lock (and people's reaction to his holographic presence) featured heavily, here he becomes significantly more part of the team, and we see not only his limitations, but some consideration of how much he should be considered a conscious entity. If anything, his abilities are slight

Anyone who looks in a bit of detail at scientific results may have come across p-values and sigmas being used to determine the significance of a outcome - but what are they, and why is there a huge disparity between practice in the social sciences and physics? These are statistical measures that determine the probability of the results being obtained if the 'null hypothesis' is true - which is to say if the effect being reported doesn't exist. The social sciences, notably psychology, usually consider the marker for statistical significance to be a p-value of less than 0.05, while in physics the aim is often to have a 5 sigma result. Both these measures depend on creating a probability distribution, showing the likelihood of different values occuring. The p-value is a direct measure of the probability of getting the reported results if the null-hypothesis applies. So, a p-value of 0.05 means there is one in twenty (1/20 = 0.05) chance of this happening. Sigmas effectively me

This isn't the kind of book I usually read, but it piqued my interest when someone told me about it - and it certainly was worth getting into. If you are a BBC Radio 4 listener (or subscribe to the Americast podcast) you will be familiar with Justin Webb's soothing tones - this memoir of his childhood through to going to university gives a vivid picture of his bizarre upbringing. Webb never met his father (who would become a reasonably well-known BBC reporter), being brought up by his mother and stepfather, each of whom had quite serious problems. His stepfather had a form of mental illness that included paranoia, while his mother was intensely snobbish, insisting on every little social divider that would put a gap between her upper-middle-class-on-hard-times position and anyone she considered socially inferior.  Their home life seems to have consisted mostly of silence, though there was a strong bond between Webb and his mother, arguably an unhealthy one. He was then sent to a

When I was 13, I sang in a performance of Mahler's third symphony with the Hallé Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli. Our school's 'special choir' was a regular feature in Manchester performances of orchestral  pieces with children's parts - amongst other outings, I sang in Stravinsky's Persephone , Verdi's Otello , Malcolm Williamson's Our Man in Havana and Mussorgsky's Khovanschina . We performed Mahler 3 a total of three times - concerts in at the Free Trade Hall and the Festival Hall, and a BBC recording for broadcast. But what I didn't realise until a few weeks ago was that the BBC had issued that recording as an album. I managed to get hold of a CD copy and had the eerie experience of hearing myself and fellow choir members from 55 years ago. The (extremely long) symphony was quite a trial of patience for us. We had movement after movement marked 'tacet' on our copies, before featuring in the 4 minutes or so of the movement marked

I get a lot of press releases, but I have enjoyed few more than one I recently got from a book review website called Summary Guru , which site carries the headline 'GET INSPIRATION FOR YOUR PAPER WITH AI POWERED BOOK SUMMARIES & ANALYSIS – PLAGIARISM FREE' (Does inspiration need to be plagiarism free? Or just stuff you copy and paste?) To demonstrate the effectiveness of Summary Guru, the release tells us 'Before Watching Netflix's One Day , Know These Five Fascinating Details From The Book' - details produced by Summary Guru. Here they are, with a few of my comments: 1. It's about a single day... across twenty years To be honest, if you don't know this before watching the series, you haven't being paying attention. 2. It deeply explores relationships This is illustrated with 'To quote Emma (the novel’s main female character): “Dexter, I love you so much…and I probably always will. I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.”' Yep, deep

I've recently been reading The Blind Spot , which describes how science tends to confuse its idealised and simplified models with reality, and how scientists have traditionally relied too much on reductionism while putting anything that involves human experience into the 'unreliable and subjective' box, even though everything we do in the sciences (as opposed to mathematics) requires the input of human experience. One of the subjects covered at length in the book is time. This is fascinating in the context, because time is the experiential phenomenon that is regarded most differently in physics than it is in reality. Some physicists go as far to say that time doesn't exist at all. Related to this, it is pointed out that many physical processes are reversible in time, where science does not care which way it goes. But in the The Blind Spot the authors emphasise that what we experience is not clock time - the only time that physics regards as real - but duration. Physic

Lewis Carroll famously came up with the nonsense riddle ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ - which was never intended to have a meaningful answer. But for some reason a piece of science news I read in Physics World inspired the question in the title of this post: why is an insect like a leased aircraft? The leased aircraft in question was one that British Airways borrowed from Aer Lingus. The plane was then repainted in BA colours for the duration. But part of the deal involved repainting the aircraft in the Irish airline’s livery and generally putting it back with the configuration Aer Lingus required before returning it. When the engineers finished, they fixed a little plaque to the instrument panel in the cockpit reading ‘FLY GREEN SIDE UP.’ The science story that made this come to mind was the answer to a long-term puzzle: why do insects seem to be so attracted to lights at night? I had heard the suggestion that they used the Moon to help with navigation - but the study shows t

Asking when 99% is less than 99% sounds like a riddle - but it's not. I recently heard a Sky Mobile radio advert in which they claimed 99% UK coverage. In the 'small print' words at the end, they said this meant they covered 99% of the population. I don't know about you, but unless I'd heard that proviso, I would have assumed that 99% coverage meant you could connect to their service in 99% of UK locations - I expected the figure to be based on area of coverage, rather than population. It might seem like this is splitting hairs, but it really isn't. Let's just imagine an unlikely version of the UK where 99% of the population lived in London (this is, after all, what most advertising people think). Having 99% coverage by Sky's definition would mean that you could only use your mobile phone in 0.65% of the country. The whole point of a mobile is to be able to use in on the move, not just at your home location. Of course, the real UK is not like my imagined

The late Fred Hoyle was one of my favourite scientists. He did impressive work on astrophysics, wrote imaginative science fiction and was an excellent science communicator, famously devising the term 'Big Bang' in a radio broadcast when he was throwing doubts on the theory. In the late 1940s, Hoyle, along with colleagues Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold at Cambridge came up with the steady state theory as an alternative to the Big Bang. One of the driving reasons behind this was that they felt that the Big Bang theory was too uncomfortably close to alignment with theological creation, and Hoyle was a staunch atheist. When I was growing up, with Hoyle as one of my heroes (a fellow northerner, if from the wrong side of the east/west border), I was sad that steady state was disproved. Hoyle never gave up on it, modifying it to match observation (just as, to be fair, Big Bang had to be modified to match observation), but it dropped out of fashion as Big Bang made an easier match to th

A couple of upcoming talk dates, plus a sneak peak of books in the production process: I've talks coming up on 17 February and 16 March, while my next book is out in July. Both talks are on Interstellar Tours : Saturday 17 February is at 10.45am at the Festival of Tomorrow in Swindon. It's part of the family day (free entrance) 10am to 5pm - my talk (£3) is on at 10.45 in the Egg Lecture theatre. You can book tickets here (click the 'Free' get tickets and then add on my talk), and find out more about the Festival here . Saturday 16 March is at the Royal Institution in London. You can find out more and book tickets (£7/£10/£16) here . I've two books in the pipeline. Due to be published in July 2024 is a book in Icon's compact Hot Science series. Called Weather Science it looks at all aspects of the weather and how meteorology has moved from folklore to leading edge computing and satellite technology. More details closer to the release date. The other I'll b

This is one of the weirdest books I have ever come across. Strictly speaking it's a short story, but packaged as a thin Ladybird-like hardback. It's number 16 in a series that began with A Balls-up in Bohemia . The weird and wonderful idea behind it is that we see Watson's original text, before it was heavily edited for publication - in this case becoming the story The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk , which after publication in the Strand magazine was incorporated into The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes . If you are a Holmes fan, as I am, it's inevitable that you open it alongside the original. After some minor deviations in the opening paragraph (such as changing the previous owner of Watson's new medical practice from Mr Farquhar in the original to the strangely spelled Dr. Farquar in the new version) it starts to bring in Nicholas Sercombe's novel ideas of what might have been edited out at the Strand, from the fact that Watson's wife Mary was actua

I quite often find myself reading food labelling, particularly if it's handy over the breakfast table. It's partly because I'm interested in what's in what I eat - but also because I had fun on a BBC TV show pointing out that it's perfectly possible, because of the mad way it's calculated, for food labelling to say that a product contains over 100% of a substance. (See the bottom of the post for my food labelling video.) The other day, I was perusing the back of a packet of little amaretti cakes (not the hard biscuits) we'd been given and noticed an ingredient that stirred some vague memory: these little Italian cakes were 34% apricot kernels. Somewhere in the depths of my mind I associated these with cyanide - something no one really wants to discover in their coffee-accompanying treat. I took a look online and discovered that while apricot kernels do not contain cyanide, they do contain 'the plant toxin amygdalin, which converts to cyanide after eatin