Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist who has primarily moved into science communication. I've personally found her helpful (if sometimes critical of popular science writers) and good at highlighting where the science community needs to think more about exactly what they are doing, and whether it is science at all.  To be balanced, Sabine is vigorous in her commoditisation of her communication. She started with a simple blog (which I think is the best thing she's done, because I don't like watching videos), but now she runs a heavy-duty commercial operation. This is not in itself a bad thing, but I have seen it suggested she is intentionally controversial, as that gets your videos more views. From my viewpoint as a more traditional science communicator, I'm all in favour of anything getting the message of science across and think she's a very useful addition to the field. In a video  entitled I can't believe this really happened (which has already rece...

It's very rare I pause the book I'm reading because another one has come out - but when it's a new Janice Hallett I really have no choice. And it was well worth the interruption. As we've come to expect from Hallett, the book is made up of forms of communication - in this case texts, WhatsApp group messages and emails, plus transcription of some police recordings. At first sight this is a simple crime setup. We are introduced to Sue and Mal Eastwood who are relatively new at running a pub - central to the story is their pub quiz, where we get introduced to a whole cast of characters in the regular teams before a sinister new team joins and wipes the floor with everyone else. Things are shaken up when a body is discovered nearby. However, being Hallett, there are also some huge twists along the way. We quickly find out about links to a major kidnapping case in the past involving key characters... and things get more and more twisty from there. As someone who write murder...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from September 2015 Roger Bacon is a misty figure in the history of science. Over the years, this thirteenth century friar has been portrayed as a mystic, magician, scientist ahead of his time and second rate collector of other people's ideas. It doesn't help that he often gets confused with his unrelated (as far as we are aware) Elizabethan namesake Francis Bacon. But it is in part because of the messy way that Roger has been reported over the years (even starring in a play by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries) that he is a fascinating subject. My book on Bacon and his science  has an intentionally provocative subtitle. I ought to make it clear that in many ways he clearly wasn't the first scientist. Apart from the impossibility of coming up with a 'first' and the argument that you couldn't have a scientist before the word was coined (a terrible argument to my mind - you might as well say there weren't dinosaurs befor...