One of the most damaging things science communication can do is exaggerate the implications of a scientific paper, theory or discovery - it happens all the time and I find it infuriating. Sometimes this hype is so bad that it's almost funny. My favourite remains the 2013 'Scientists Finally Invent Real, Working Lightsabers' from the Guardian - I just love that 'finally', as if saying 'scientists what have you been doing all this time?', but the reality was a couple of photons had been made to briefly interact in a Bose Einstein condensate. Mostly, though, these headlines are cringe-making, scientific clickbait of the worst kind. Some of this comes from publications - I had to stop reading New Scientist because I got so fed up with their exaggerated headlines - some from university press offices, desperate to justify funding, and some from scientists themselves, because they are only human, and some enjoy being in the limelight. But all such hype damages trus...

Having read a considerable amount about the kind of AI chatbot that is genuinely a way to have a chat with an animated character, rather than typing text to ask for a recipe or whatever, I somewhat nervously took the plunge and summoned up Grok's Ani. I ought to give some context here first. In the early days of dial up computer networks when, of course, I was on CompuServe (as opposed to AOL - you have to have been there), I occasionally dipped a toe into chatrooms (technology- topics, I should emphasise, nothing dodgy). I found the experience terrifying. I think that without visual cues, I found the flow of messages from others overwhelming, and found it difficult to respond quickly as I would in a normal conversation. I needed time to think when communicating online, and I would often drop out of a conversation very quickly. Since then, having read about people becoming obsessed with these AI chatbots, I wondered why they didn't experience the same hesitation. I guess some n...

Having recently driven around 2,000 miles in France it was informative to experience a pricing structure that surely we should be following in the UK if we are serious about the move to electric vehicles. Petrol in France was typically significantly dearer than in the UK. On motorways it was often well over 2 euros per litre, and I never saw it less than about €1.65. The equivalent in pounds would be well over £1.80 and never below £1.45. Currently it is £1.32 at my local garage. By contrast, electric car charging was a bargain. Here in the UK you will rarely find a public charger at under 60p per kWh, and a high speed charger is likely to be around 89p - I've never looked on motorways, but I suspect they may be even higher. Note that to be cheaper than petrol, electricity needs to be under around 45p/kWh. The cheapest we found in France (Lidl) was 39c (34p) for a high speed charger and even on a motorway, where petrol was over €2 I found a high speed charger at under 50c (44p). Yo...

For me, P. D. James’s Dalgleish mysteries are always slightly compromised by the original TV series. With its hauntingly beautiful theme music and Roy Marsden’s sympathetically approachable if intellectual Dalgleish as a model, the original books can feel a little long, and James’s original Dalgleish a little too cold and unapproachable. Having said that, Death in Holy Orders  from 2001 is definitely one of her best. Set in a wild Suffolk seaside location (one that the theme tune seems ideal for), the book takes Dalgleish to a small Victorian theology college, initially to investigate an ordinand’s apparent accidental death on the beach, but soon to be followed by a murder. James is great at sense of place, and gives an impressive feel for the college, its resident priests and the assorted others that are thrown into what amounts to a traditional country house murder in a much more interesting setting. The book is unnecessarily long at over 500 pages, but I hardly ever felt it was ...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from September 2015 In the book I was writing when this post was written ( Dice World ) I considered the relationship of the arrow of time to entropy, the measure of the disorder in a system that comes out of the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy can be calculated by looking at the number of different ways to arrange the components that make up a system. The more ways there are to arrange them, the greater the entropy. As an example of why this is the case, I was talking about the letters that go together to make up that book, and the very specific arrangement of them required to be that actual book. Assuming that there will be about 500,000 characters including spaces in the book by the time it's finished, then there are 500,000! ways of arranging those characters. That's 500,000 factorial, which is 500,000x499,999x499,998x499,997... - rather a big number. It's not practical to calculate the number exactly, but there are approximation ...

As a big fan of UK-based urban fantasy, I'm always on the lookout for something new:  Fiends in High Places promised to deliver that difficult combination of urban fantasy and humour. It has some engaging points - but on the whole doesn't quite make it. In D. C. Farmer's world there is a small establishment that tries to operate as an immigration control for fae - creatures from other intersecting realities, often with magical abilities. The central character Matt Danmor is thrust into this unseen world when he witnesses an attempt to sacrifice one of those in control of immigration and gradually discovers that he is, himself, not just an ordinary person on the street (after falling in love with the would-be sacrifice's niece). Unfortunately, the humour is heavy handed. At one point, for example, our hero (accompanied by a sweary talking vulture) travels to an alternate world where shops include Bloops (the apothecary), Harpy Nix, Herods, Starstrucks, Mage & Septre...

It is somehow appropriate that I read this as as result of listening to a podcast where two of the contributors debated whether the BBC was biased. The book stresses both the need for the Beeb to change in the face of a changing media landscape, what that change should be, and how the BBC should be funded. Like most books comprising a whole list of essays from different contributors there is inevitably both conflict and overlap. And a handful of the contributions were dull corporate speak. Nonetheless there was plenty of genuinely engaging content for anyone who wants the BBC to exist but realises it needs fundamental change. It was certainly interesting to see how the same problems could result in very different suggested solutions as pros and cons were discussed of subscription and taxation, hybrid or otherwise, and even some genuinely original suggestions like building a BBC AI that would act as the interface to its material. The only major irritation I had as an older person who o...

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...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from August 2015 I was interested to note a debacle started by  a dated US list  of top 100 science fiction and fantasy books. We'll come back to this furore over the suggestion that many of these books were 'shockingly offensive' in a moment, but first a couple of comments about the list itself. To me it seems a category error to conflate fantasy and science fiction - where most of their SF choices seemed sensible, I wouldn't have included over 50 per cent of the fantasy, which makes me suspect that there should be two separate lists. If we just concentrate on the SF books, there were inevitably some ridiculous omissions. No John Wyndham, for instance (probably reflecting this being a US list). No Alfred Bester, James Blish, Fred Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth or (if you want to be more obscure) no E. F. Russell. However it wasn't a bad list overall - no one will ever agree with everything in such a collection. So what about the  moaning ar...

As a writer I have (unsurprisingly) something of a bias towards the written word. I hate getting information from videos because they are so slow at putting stuff across - when I've had to do an online course with videos, I always use the transcript instead if available and get through it in half the time. I'm just not very visually oriented. But that said, I can of course see the benefit of graphics as a way of putting across a piece of information where words can be clumsy. When I help students and academics with their papers I always ask them to ensure that a figure, or diagram or chart adds something to the text. They should never be there simply because they feel they need one. However, when it comes to packaging it seems that graphic designers sometimes rule the roost and the result can be a mangling of the message. Take the graphic above. We've got two boxes - one red with a slash through it. That's obviously the 'don't do this' box. And the other is ...

When researching my book Brainjacking on the science of human use of story to inform, influence and manipulate, I came across an intriguing article in The Times . 'AI will read your mind sooner than you think' blared the headline on Rhys Blakely's piece. He describes the interpretation of signals from electrodes in the brain, processed by AI to help a disabled person be more independent, which is fascinating. But we are then told 'But what about the rest of us? Would you allow a computer direct access to your thoughts? The question isn't as far fetched as it once was.' Hype or accurate observation? Blakely describes an experiment at UC Berkeley where subjects were played music - with the help of AI it was possible for listeners to identify the music from processed brain signals, and even pick out some of the words. I looked into the detail of this experiment for the book. Firstly, given that introduction, you might think this involved detecting your brain activ...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from August 2015 Recently I was berated on Facebook for appealing to authority. As it may not be obvious to everyone why this was a put down (as the picture makes clear it was), I thought it might be worth looking at the problem with authority in science - and why I wasn't actually falling for this failing. Arguably the biggest issue with Ancient Greek science, an approach that spread its way through most of the medieval period, was the dependence on authority. Just as we still do in law cases, most classical natural philosophy was decided by argument rather than by experiment or analysis. If someone repeatedly won the argument on a topic they were regarded as an authority and in some cases - Aristotle is the most obvious example - considered a source of wisdom on pretty well everything as a result. Hence the infamous suggestion that women had fewer teeth than men because Aristotle said it was so, and no one bothered to check. (Actually I am sure p...

No, not the Magic Roundabout that was a teatime treat on TV many years ago. And not Nikola Tesla either. We are taking about the US electric car company and one of the best-known features of my home town Swindon - our Magic Roundabout. The reason for this post is that Tesla has been doing some testing of fully self-driving cars in the UK, and a test site they have publicised is getting across the Magic Roundabout. We inhabitants of Swindon are rather proud of our ability to fearlessly cross the Magic Roundabout, but it certainly puts an aspect of nervousness into many who encounter it for the first time. What can be scary about a roundabout? Because it isn't really that at all - it is five mini-roundabouts joined together by very short sections of roadway. The diagram alongside shows the layout of the roundabout, and two possible routes for getting from the bottom left road to the right hand one. This is what makes it so much fun. You can go whichever way you like around the whole...

I am somewhat amazed that, despite having read all 10 main novels in the series, this is the first of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series that I've reviewed. It might seem odd that a book in a series with that title is set in and around Aberdeen, but you need to realise that the 'rivers' in question are genii loci - spirits of a river, one of whom is present. What I love about the series is that it combines police procedural (Aaronovitch delights in details like airwave radios and stab vests) with magic. In the early books, the central character, DS Peter Grant, is a newbie to the whole magic world, but ends up posted with a specialist unit dealing with magical threats (and trying to drag them into the twenty-first century). This time round, the oddities include dangerous magical beasts, kelpies and mermaids. This is, unfortunately, probably the weakest in the series. In part this is because Aaronovitch splits the first person narrative between Grant and his niec...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from July 2015 I've recently had a very mild case of being trolled when someone moaned about a review I wrote of a book called  Chilled .  Before anyone thinks I got too horrible in my opinion, I ought to point out that I gave the book four stars, was very positive about it and the publisher gave every evidence of being highly pleased with the review. But someone wasn't (and certainly wasn't chilled), as I received this tweet: If this sounds rather confusing, I had said in my review: There are comments on both the front and back covers by Tony Hawks. Now, my first inclination was to wonder what a pro skateboarder had to do with the science of cooling. But it turns out that this is Tony Hawks the comedian and raconteur. Ah, well, it's obvious what his connection is. Well, no, it isn't. Apparently he did a TV show and/or book where he went round Ireland with a fridge, and this is the only reason for having him along to give the book a...

One of the interesting things about moving from an ancient car to a recent model is the availability of mechanisms to help the driver. At the extreme level, such as claimed by Tesla, this goes all the way to driving for you (occasionally into things you don't want to drive into). My car doesn't go that far, but for me provides three levels that give me what feels, for the moment, to provide the Goldilocks ideal of not too intrusive, not too feeble, but just right. At the highest level, which I use on motorways and fast dual carriageways, it keeps me at my desired speed, slowing down if there's an obstacle in front, keeps me in lane and (when it's in the mood) will change lane when I indicate. The fascinating thing about this is that because the steering movements are very gentle it is almost impossible to detect that it is steering unless you take your hands off the wheel (at which point, the car fairly rapidly starts to complain). Steering is such an automatic thing fo...