I was just reading about the work of some Victorian scientists, and it struck me that, until the twentieth century, science was a doddle.

I mean, admittedly you still needed to be something special to have the insight of a Newton. But most of the key experiments up to the latter parts of the nineteenth century could be carried out by eleven-year-olds in their kitchen. At worst, they certainly wouldn’t stretch a secondary school science lab.

Similarly, where maths itself had already headed off into the stratosphere by Victorian times, until Maxwell came along, most teenagers could cope with what’s necessary.

Now, though, you’ve experiments that take the budget of a small country, or that require specialist equipment most of us don’t understand, or you work at a level of precision that’s outside the scope of the normal human being. Similarly, the maths has gone beyond anything we do, even at the top end of school.

Once this mental explosion was really only true of physics (hence Rutherford’s infamous remark), but these days it applies to all the sciences, as any non-biologist can testify when facing the sort of thing many Nature Networkers contribute.

So the question’s simple. Do you have to be cleverer to be a scientist now than you used to be? Is there any hope for us normal mortals, or are you working scientists all superhuman geniuses that make the rest of seem like Homer Simpsons? We have a right to know.

However, when you look at the different views on reality espoused by politicians and scientists, it’s not entirely surprising that politicians find it difficult to grok science.

Take our most scientifically educated Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. She famously said words to the effect of ‘You turn if you want to; the lady’s not for turning.’ (Editorial types, please note use of semi-colon. Do I get a point?)

Politicians hate the concept of changing their mind. Once they’ve settled on a policy, that’s the way things have to stay.

Science, however, thrives on U-turns. In a good Popperian sense, it’s the U-turns that fuel scientific advance. It’s only by disproving theories we can take steps forward.

Science, in the end, is aiming for accuracy in fact. Politics doesn’t really care so much about the content – it’s the presentation that matters.

If that isn’t a recipe for a clash, then what is?

Do I offer a solution? Not a complete one. However, it does seem to suggest, as mentioned in many places on this site (see for example this and here) that scientists need to put more work into their presentation, to be able to gain the politicians’ attention (‘Shiny things, chaps, shiny things! Come and look!’).

Equally, politicians need to be forcibly educated in the scientific method, logical thinking and handling data. How about a compulsory ‘scientific method and logical thinking 101’ course that every new MP has to take before taking their seat in the house?

However I didn’t think either of these when following a car with such numberplates this evening. I thought ‘Yes, but why?’

The numberplate read RISK OO (or to be precise R15KOO, but it was arranged to read RISK OO). What was that all about?

• An imagined conversation? – ‘You’re a risk on the road!’ / ‘Oo(h you are awful, but I like you!)’
• Baby talk? ‘Oo’s a big risk, den? Is ums?’
• A really dangerous wrecker of OO model railway layouts?

The mind boggles.

Why is it places like Swindon get so much stick? I’ve commented before on the similar attitude to two of the places I’ve lived (Swindon and Slough).

Speaking afterwards to the organizer of the very successful festival (and a jolly good event it was too), he said that when he first proposed the idea of a Swindon Festival of Literature, he was told by the Arts Council that ‘literature’ was too long a word for Swindon. How about ‘Swindon Book Week’?

I’m also reminded of an Al Stewart concert I once attended in Swindon. (See, we’ve got culture.) All the way through it, Mr Stewart kept saying ‘Swindon’ with a quizical tone and a shake of the head, as if to say ‘what have I done to deserve this?’

In the end, it’s very condescending. Anyone ‘provincial’ in the UK suffers from London-based stereotyping.

But at least here on Nature Network there’s no such problem. Let’s see, now, what’s the choice up at the top? Global, London or Boston. Hmm…

Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn’t. Sir Arthur Eddington

Eddington, famed as a champion of relativity, points out the flaw in the idea of a natural ‘law’. I do sometimes think one of the greatest mistakes in terms of public understanding of science is the term ‘law’ which implies something more fixed in concrete and certain than science can ever offer.

If no one had ever framed ‘laws’, we wouldn’t have all those ‘just a theory’ arguments, nor such dire misunderstanding of how science works.

Science is simply common sense at its best. Thomas Huxley

Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, made a comment that manages to be so right and so wrong simultaneously. When talking about evolution by natural selection, he is spot on. It’s hard to see, once you have the basic concept, how it can fail to be true.

When talking about (say) quantum physics, he is (as the saying has it) not even wrong. He’s so far away from right to have disappeared beyond the event horizon.

I suspect Huxley’s statement is a quantum superposition of wrong and right.

Just for amusement’s sake, here is what my current body of work looks like:

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The less numerically challenged among you (those who don’t count on their fingers) may wonder how this represents 31 books. Although what you see are all unique, they do include different editions and translations. I’ve never done a headcount of these before, but it amounts to 112 in all.

Thank goodness I’ve never bothered to read them.

Like many authors, I sometimes wonder why I do it. Practically every part of the process is painful. Okay, there’s a teensy bit of ‘wow, I did that’ when you get you hands on the finished product, or see it on a bookshop shelf, but a lot of stages along the way are more unpleasant than enjoyable. I’m yet to meet a writer who isn’t an excellent procrastinator, doing almost anything to avoid getting down to committing words to paper or disc. (Some even resort to writing blogs to avoid getting on with a book.)

The answer to ‘why I do it’, I suspect, is because I have to. I can’t not write. It’s just a part of my nature. (I wonder what the kind of people who are now driven to write did before they invented writing? I’m not sure it’s enough to say they were storytellers. It’s a different thing.)

So tomorrow morning, book number 32 (ulp) is on its way to the publisher, and I will be in that painful state that accompanies this part of the process. ‘Will they like it?’ I’ll be thinking. ‘Is it rubbish?’

Luckily I have a suitable distraction from the worries. Here goes number 33…

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes. W. H. Auden

Before any scientists feel rather special after reading this, I think it relates rather well to a subject oft discussed on Nature Network – bad science communication. This can leave the listener feeling inadequate, like old W. H. But if it does, it’s the communicator who is in the wrong, not the listener.

I watched a piece last night on our local TV news about a new design of inhaler that uses technology based on the way puffball spores are dispersed. In the one clip where the scientist was allowed to speak he managed to squeeze in so many jargon words that his bit to camera did not move the story on one bit, apart from to make the viewer feel ‘he’s clever, isn’t he?’

Surely scientists should have got the message by now. Using big technical words doesn’t impress anyone, any more than Alan Sugar’s Rolls Royce. They’re both symbols of inadequacy.

Second quote:

All science is either physics or stamp collecting. Ernest Rutherford

Sorry, couldn’t resist this one given the high occurance of biology types on Nature Network. Next time you’re baffling me with your biology technology in-jokes, I shall mutter Rutherford’s remark with deep satisfaction.

Apparently Ms Greer told the assembled boys gathered to hear her that she had ‘seldom, if ever, found herself standing in a room amid so much masculine beauty.’

At question time, one of the pupils commented that if she were not a 69-year-old woman addressing a group of boys but a 69-year-old man addressing a group of girls, such a statement would be considered highly inappropriate.

Alledgedly Ms Greer was lost for words. I think there could be some re-worded old aphorism here along the lines of ‘what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.’

See the full story

The originators are attempting to find a way to get oil companies to reduce petrol prices, and the cunning plan is to get everyone to boycott two of the biggest name chains. That way, they argue, prices will have to be brought down, but we can still get our petrol.

What do you think? Leaving aside the dodgy chainmail maths, is this a sensible tactic? Is its stated goal (to reduce petrol prices in the UK to order of 69p a litre) a reasonable one? With our green hats on, should we even be trying to reduce petrol prices? I’m genuinely unsure.

Another question – the originators suggest we buy petrol from supermarkets etc. – I presume supermarkets get their petrol from oil companies. So could buying at (say) Tesco put money in (say) Esso’s pocket anyway? I don’t know.

The text:
See what you think and pass it on if you agree with it

We are hitting 108.9p a litre in some areas now, soon we will be faced with paying £1.10 a ltr.

Philip Hollsworth offered this good idea:

This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the ‘don’t buy petrol on a certain day campaign that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn’t
continue to hurt ourselves by refusing to buy petrol. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT,whoever
thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work.

Please read it and join in!

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a litre is CHEAP, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace not sellers. With the price of petrol going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone in the pocket by not purchasing their Petrol! And we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. Here’s the idea:

For the rest of this year DON’T purchase ANY petrol from the two biggest oil companies (which now are one), ESSO and BP.

If they are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact we need to reach literally millions of Esso and BP petrol buyers. It’s really simple to do!!

Now, don’t wimp out at this point… keep reading and I’ll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

I am sending this note to a lot of people. If each of you send it
to
at least ten more (30×10 = 300)... and those 300 send it to at
least ten more (300×10 = 3,000) ... and so on, by the time the
message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached
over THREE MILLION consumers! If those three million get excited and
pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, you guessed it… ..

THREE HUNDRED MILLION
PEOPLE!!!

Again, all You have to do is send this to 10 people. That’s all.(and not buy at ESSO/BP) How long would all that take? If each of us sends this email out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8days!!! Acting together we can make a difference. If this makes
sense to you, please pass this message on.

PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE 69p a LITRE RANGE

It’s easy to make this happen. Just forward this email, and buy your petrol at Shell, Asda,Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons Jet etc. i.e. boycott BP and Esso.

There were five adults present along with a two-year-old. The two-year-old had a toy that shone a picture in yellow light onto the surface it was pointed at.

Someone suggested the child shone the picture on their (black) trouser leg. I pointed out it would show up better on their white sock. ‘Surely,’ came the reply, ‘yellow would stand out better against black than white?’

Three out of five adults were Cambridge graduates – but still the immediate consensus without thinking about it, apart from me, was that a yellow light would show up better projected on black than on white.

After a little thought, at least one came round to my line of thinking, but the rest put up a defence. ‘What colour is a movie screen?’ I asked. ‘That’s different,’ they said. ‘That’s in the dark.’

What this little encounter made me think is that we are inudated with art in kindergarten and primary school. Art tells us that yellow will show up better on black than white. But we get very little thinking about science – so don’t really question how limited this view is. Similarly we get told the primary colours are red yellow and blue, not red, blue and green.

I’m not suggesting we stop youngsters playing with paints, but I do think we should give them more science-based toys to play with so they discover more at the same age how light acts. Arguably also we should teach colour first from a light-based view and then consider pigment, rather than the other way round.

Whether or not you agree with that, the reaction of those in the room with the two-year-old was a salutory lesson. C. P. Snow would be turning in his grave.

J K Rowling is upset because someone has put together an unoffical book about her work. She doesn’t want anyone else to make money out of what she’s done. Why is it always the multi-millionaires who get upset about someone else making money?

The fact is she seems not to know about the rich tradition of fan writing in science fiction and fantasy. Books like this won’t stop one single Harry Potter book – or official book about Harry Potter – being sold. If anything they increase sales of other references. If you’re a fan, you buy whatever comes out.

Worse still, her attitude seems to say that it’s not acceptable to write anything about other people’s work. That’s just crazy.

Excuse me if I’ve mentioned this before, but it really gets up my nose.

Apparently she thinks it will clear the way for ‘countless rip-offs of her books.’ Sorry, this is rubbish. A book about another book (or a TV show, or a scientific breakthrough) is not a rip-off it’s a tribute. She’ll be saying it’s not acceptable to write biographies next.

We are told in the hagiographies of Rowling of how the poor single mother scrawled her first work in a railway station buffet, hoping to earn a crust. But perish the thought anyone else should…

Initially wary, I soon discovered I had an affinity for the things, and discovered the genuine creative joy of programming.

I can still remember the gut-wrenching horror I felt when seeing an advert for a new piece of software. My memory distantly labels this as ‘The Last One’. That could be memory playing tricks, but I have found this reference to it so I could be right.

Whatever it was called, the advert promised that it would mean companies could do away with programmers. No more programming. Just tell it what you wanted and it would write the program for you. And having just discovered I had something of a skill, plus a real passion for this programming thing, I was gutted.

Luckily for me, ‘The Last One’ was anything but what it says on the tin. With hindsight, this was predictable, but at the time it sounded a real possibility.

In science and technology, journalists find it particularly easy to fall for the lure of ‘The Last One’. How often have we heard something will mean ‘the end of…’ only to find days, months and years later things haven’t changed that much?

Is it that there are always fresh faced young things like I was back in 19 blah-di-blah, easily taken in by the latest promise? Or do we all secretly long for the magic wand that will take away something at a stroke? Perhaps that’s why Harry Potter is so popular…

It was interesting stuff, but what struck me particularly was the sheer fun and joy of the archeologist opening a jar that had been sealed for so many years. It was real and it was infectous.

Now, she had reason for this – it was the first tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings since Tutankhamun’s. Yet what struck me is how different she was to the way scientists usually are on the TV.

Normally the media either gives us deadpan, emotionless scientists, or people with LOADS of enthusiasm that strays well into the artificial.

What was different here was that it was genuine emotion. She was chuckling and happy, throwing comments about with her fellow workers – of course there was enthusiasm, but it was much than the forced excitement of the typical science broadcaster.

I know it’s difficult when cameras come into the lab as we’ve seen elsewhere in Nature Network blogs (can someone provide me with a link, I’m feeling lazy) – but I do believe science needs much more of this in its public face. Real fun, and real disappointment. Human reactions. Maybe then we could break through the stereotypes.

The unnerving aspect of this is that it is an approximate quote from the driven (and murderous) Prime Ministerial candidate/Prime Minister Francis Urquart in the drama House of Cards.

It made me wonder which fictional scientists the real ones could quote and to what effect. Richard Dawkins quoting Dr Strangelove, perhaps? Or Martin Rees giving us a touch of Mr Spock.

In fact there’s a good potential game here. It’s not unheard of for scientific papers or books to contain a literary quote (all too often Lewis Carroll), but how about trying to slip a quote from a fictional scientist into a paper without people noticing it?

I saw what must have been a similar exercise a few months ago on TV. For a few seconds the dialogue between two characters in the soap opera Coronation Street was lifted wholesale from a 1940s/50s Hollywood movie. The delightful thing is 9 out 10 people would not have noticed, so for those of us who did there was a frisson of fun and a sense of ‘aren’t I clever?’

We keep hearing moans about papers being too boring – here’s one way to liven them up. The secret quote. (NB, as I’m sure the important people from Nature will point out, this should be from a fictional scientist, as quoting someone else’s paper is rather more… well, plagiarism.)

Trusty dog at Post Office – Photos hosted by Flickr

As I walked down I become more and more concerned. What had happened to the villagers?

I have two hypotheses.

1) I haven’t been in the village long. Could there be some strange festival on May Day? Should I be looking with fear for the Wicker Man?

2) The place was strangely deserted. Could these be the villagers I was seeing, transformed to these horrific travesties?

If so, could I be next? If you don’t hear from me again, you’ll understand.

Beware! Beware the village of… HISS CRACKLE

Mr Clegg is not feeling well.

He is taking a little rest.

Do not be alarmed.

Everything is normal.

Exterminate! ... oh b+++er!

It’s about online worlds like Second Life. In the chapter on those who choose an avatar of the opposite sex, there’s the comment that one way to tell is that men tend to use punctuation in chat, while women don’t.

Hmm. I’m starting to look through those Nature Network blog entries. Is everyone out there what they seem?

Like all authors, I get book reviews that upset me. But I have to tolerate those where it’s simply a difference of opinion. That’s life. But this review is bad because it is sloppy and unprofessional – and that’s unacceptable.

We’re not talking a blog or a passing comment on Amazon. This is a review by a (once) respected writer in a newsstand magazine. I’m not going to name either here, but the review is of my book The Global Warming Survival Kit

There are two things that have really wound me up here. One is that there is good evidence that the writer of the review didn’t read the book. I review lots of books professionally, and I wouldn’t take the money if I hadn’t time to read the book cover to cover. But this appears to be a skim job. There are several pointers to this, but the clearest is that it says at one point Clegg offers tips on how to prepare a worm sandwich. Unfortunately, there’s nothing in the text about worm sandwiches. There is a section with a heading Worm sandwiches – and that seems to be as far as he has read.

My other issue with this ‘review’ is that almost all the points are either factually incorrect, or taken out of context in a way that makes them misleading. Here are few examples:

I looked in vain for a section on… reducing your impact on the planet – This totally misses the point of the book. There are dozens of books on the shelves on cutting your carbon footprint etc. This book isn’t about what we can do to reduce impact, it’s about coping with the problems caused by climate change.

advises all manner of hoarding and selfishness, while warning against displaying “conspicuous consumption” – the whole point of the book is advice on being prepared, for example for water shortages. So it tells you how to store water. The same with food. That’s simple practicality. But the bit about not displaying “conspicuous consumption” is about surviving in a riot or on city streets when tensions are high. If the author wants to go about flashing a Macbook Air in a dangerous district, that’s his affair, but it seems a perfectly reasonable warning and is totally out of context in the way it’s phrased here.

I looked in vain for a section on sharing what you have – Leaving aside the observation that this is facile, and is a matter of personal choice, I have a section on using personal networks to help each other, over half a chapter on helping other people with first aid, and a whole chapter on not losing your humanity. It seems his flick through was very brief.

What it comes down to in the end is that I am rather offended to be called hysterical, and to be described as if I am championing “conspicuous consumption” by someone hypocritical enough to preach about reducing our impact on the planet while admitting to spending much of his life jetting around the world. For the record, I’ve flown once in the last 15 years.

This is a lazy, unprofessional review and if I was rating it on the Popular Science Website I would give it one star, on a scale that goes from two to five.

Their latest models have micro SD memory slots, and I was cajoled into finding them some cheap memory – then blown away at just how cheap it was. I mean £4.50 for 2 Gb. And that’s from Amazon themselves – or at least the company that does memory for them. Someone else is selling them there at 99p (though that is with a bigger shipping charge).

Two things amaze me. One is the old fogey thing (I can remember when 16k of memory cost much more than this) and the other is the way some shops just haven’t caught up. You can merrily pay £20 for the same thing from a high street retailer I won’t name to avoid their embarrassment. It’s not often you see that much variation in a commodity price.

Why the ire? According to Wiseman’s Quirkology website the two names that people think sound least successful are Lisa and, well, Brian.

This was based on that most accurate of scientific tools, a poll. (That previous statement should be in a special font type denoting irony, but there isn’t one. Why not?)

But what sort of people did he poll? I mean who could put Brian beneath the Shanes and Waynes and Kevins, or Lisa beneath Janice and Tracy? (If your name’s in there, or your nearest and dearest, don’t get angry with me – I hope I’ll show how this is meaningless.)

My suspicion is, as far as the polling goes, that people confused celebrity with success, forgetting that the whole point of celebrity (with a small C) is about being famous for not being successful at anything. Opinions of names were being influenced by awareness of ‘famous’ people.

And that brings me on to my main point – the whole exercise, I believe, is invalid, because our attitude to names is so strongly influenced by the individual people we know. I don’t know anyone called Wayne, so it’s not a name I particularly rate. When I was a teenager, I thought the name Valerie sounded like a unsuccessful and unattractive person, until I met someone called Valerie at university who was clearly (at the time) the most wonderful person in the world, and suddenly it was a name that indicated beauty, wisdom and success.

All our Dick has succeeded in doing, I suspect, is reflecting the associative groups of those polled – clearly people who didn’t mix with Lisas and Brians, or they’d know better.

For those not familiar with these excellent institutions, they’re opportunities to pop along to a sociable venue (in this case, upstairs at Cafe Rouge), hear about some sciency thing, then discuss it.

There was a great audience (the place was so packed the patrons of the restaurant had some difficulty getting to the toilets) and I think a good time was had by all. But things didn’t start off quite so rosy.

Thanks to the wonders of GPS I had no problem finding the handy car park I’d chosen. Even the fees weren’t too bad as it was long stay. So there I was standing in front of the pay and display machine, trying to work out the tarriff and a horrible realization struck. One of those real pit of the stomach things. I’d changed my trousers just before going out – and left all my cash and cards at home. I literally didn’t have a penny.

As I’d also failed to get a mobile number for the organizer, here I was stuck in a town I’d never visited before, penniless, facing a rampant pay and display machine. Much though I love Cafe Scientifique, they aren’t cash rich, and their expenses certainly wouldn’t run to covering a parking ticket.

Thankfully, after the initial panic, I noticed the good burghers of Leamington had arrange a car park that was designed for my plight. I’d had arrived at 5.45. This car park issued free 15 minute tickets – and stopped charging at 6pm. That brief moment of sheer panic was over.

So recovered was I, that I even enjoyed a frisson of naughtiness when I reached Cafe Rouge. My host had yet to arrive and I ordered a coffee. Bearing in mind I hadn’t a penny, this felt really wicked. Luckily said host did turn up and was happy to bail me out… but I could have been on washing up duty instead of talking about infinity.

When not hard at work writing the next book, I run our village choir. I soon discovered that one of their favourite composers was someone I’d never heard of in a couple of decades of singing – a man called Caleb Simper (what a name).

To be honest, it’s really not my kind of music – seriously Victorian. I particularly like Vaughan Williams’ comment about Simper and his contemporary Maunder: Composers with ridiculous names: their names are about the one thing these composers couldn’t help; other aspects of their activities are less innocent.

However, we were going to perform a Simper piece and I wanted some programme notes, so looked him up on the web, only to find there was practically nothing about him there. He wasn’t in Groves, the ultimate musical dictionary, either.

Now you might think ‘not surprising with some obscure guy’, but in his day, Simper was the equivalent of Andrew Lloyd Webber. He had over 5 million copies of his music sold – that’s a lot of music.

So I looked into him and have ended up custodian of the Caleb Simper website

This has resulted in Simper sightings all over the world. In the UK, with most lesser Victorians he was successfully expunged from many music cupboards in the 1960s, but he has clung on well in Australia, the USA, South Africa and India.

So I now find myself in a really strange position. I feel I ought to keep this web page up, as the guardian of Simper’s memory. But I can’t stand his music! Hey ho. Life keeps us on our toes.

Here is a typical submission:

Name:TanGUwGsZGqhzMp
Email address: iAqkthubrebtC
Country: FZYhYMVnPAEcGpS

Now assuming no one is so totally mindless as to sit and type this in, it’s presumably some sort of automated attempt to login. But given it’s not a login screen, and they’re using such utter garbage in the attempt, it makes you wonder why they bother.

Go on guys. Get a life. Get a Second Life. But hey, teacher, leave my forms alone. (Sorry, came over all Pink Floyd.)

While I was typing this I’ve had a request for oVLWBShJH to join. I’d don’t think I’m giving anything away to tell you (s)he lives in VZzatqMow.

Arrggh!

According to the soon-to-be-published The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments Pavlov did much more than train dogs to salivate when they heard a bell ring. Using their reaction to stimuli he was able to deduce, for instance, that they could measure periods of time reasonably accurately, and distinguish musical notes in a chord.

Vilmos Csanyi’s If Dogs Could Talk gives an even more powerful insight into the surprising mental abilities of dogs, sometimes even exceeding what the great apes are capable of in cognition.

My own example is less large scale, but still impresses me. Our dog

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has developed at least one clear piece of sign language. When she wants you to rub her tummy, she lies on her side and moves her front paws towards her head. This doesn’t make sense unless you realize that the only way she can stroke herself is to bring her front paws up either side of her face in a more exaggerated version of exactly the same movement.

Her sign for ‘stroke me’ is a curtailed version of the action by which she strokes herself. Okay, it’s not rocket science, but I still think it’s clever.

At risk of being Ann Robinson’d +, Cardiff city centre isn’t the greatest tourist destination I’ve ever seen. Of course there is the castle, of which more later, but the city centre itself is a bit like a huge great building site with Reading town centre attached.

I can, however, recommend the Bay area – very scenic. I always wondered how in the TV show Torchwood, which uses this as one of its main locations, they managed to get the place looking so empty. But that’s exactly how it was on Friday morning (except that the exciting fountain was switched off).

However, what concerns me here is Cardiff Castle (sorry, railway anoraks, the building not the steam engine). We thought we’d pop in and see this glory of Cardiff. ‘Next tour is 10.30,’ we were told. But we didn’t want a guided tour, just a stroll around, we said. No way. No tour, no entry. So, sadly, feeling stroppy, we only saw it from the outside.

+ Note for those not of the UK persuasion, Ms Robinson, erstwhile TV presenter of The Weakest Link, was allegedly arrested (though released without charge) for an offence against the race relations act for daring to say something nasty about the Welsh.

Brain Gym is a programme that is used by a good number of UK primary schools, which is supposed to help children concentrate better, learn to read quicker etc.

Take a look at the Newsnight clips – I recommend just watching the first clip for a minute or so to get a feel for Brain Gym techniques (the report gets a bit tedious), then switch to the second one where Jeremy Paxman absolutely slaughters the befuddled Brain Gym founder.

Although I enjoyed watching Paxo giving this man a stuffing, it does raise two big concerns for me.

One is that our cash-strapped schools have wasted money on this twaddle. See Paxman tear the Brain Gym man apart for claiming in his teachers’ manual that processed foods contain no water. Be entertained as Mr Brain Gym tries to explain his system and ends up talking about channelling energy to the brain with massage – I’m surprised he didn’t get onto chakras.

The second concern I have is that bad feeling about Brain Gym activities could do damage to those who have useful things to teach about creativity and the brain. When not writing, I give seminars to organizations on creativity – there’s no pseudo science or massages. It’s pure practical problem solving techniques from about 50 years of psychological & business development that work for good, logical reasons. No dependence on channeling energies, or magically pure water. But it’s easy to be tarred with the same brush.

There was an observation in the first Newsnight clip that there were slight improvements in some aspects of children’s work from their Brain Gym activities. I would expect that. For years people have been encouraged to take a quick break after working on something for 45 minutes or so. To take five minutes exercise, or to use the brain in a different type of activity. It’s obvious and makes sense – otherwise your concentration drops off and you lose effectiveness. But that’s quite different from the sort of specific claims made by Brain Gym.

Let’s hope that our schools will learn the right lessons from these revelations.

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... to show but a few. Many are female, though even the male of the species gets a look in:

‘What’s it all about?’ They cry. ‘Is it a good idea?’ I think it is – and it is not only because my next book Upgrade Me: Our Amazing Journey to Human 2.0 due out in a couple of months from St Martin’s Press has this on the front:

There are two reasons this trend makes good psychological sense to me. One is that anticipation gets the brain more active than the experience that’s anticipated. We can get more of those ‘who is THAT?’ neurons firing with a back of the head than a face.

Secondly it overcomes a real problem, particularly for younger readers. You really get into a book, really see a character in your mind. Then you look at the representation of them on the front of the book and it’s wrong. With a back of the head shot this is less likely to happen.

Of course the nice thing about my cover is it’s even ambiguous as far as the sex of the person featured is concerned. I first thought it was male, but after someone made this comment and I looked again, I’m really not sure… (But, be assured, it’s not me!)

Whatever, this snow covered plants (and cars) but left paved areas, tarmac etc. totally clear. Take, for instance, the driveway to Clegg Towers:

Hosted by Flickr

I can only assume that because yesterday had been quite warm, and there was a sudden drop in temperature that brought the snow overnight, the paved areas acted as storage heaters and wouldn’t let it settle – but the effect is great.

The theme was money in writing, a sore point with most writers whose intials aren’t JKR. One story stood out for me. Apparently megapublisher HarperCollins is to form a new publishing group that will try a very different model with money. They won’t pay authors any advances, but when the cash starts rolling in, will split the profits (whatever that means) 50:50 with the author.

I have two questions I’d like to ask Robert S. Miller who is to head up this new outfit.

The first: will everyone working for the company – him included – not receive any salary, but instead wait until there are profits to share and pay themselves out of those? It can take up to three years from committing time to writing a book to receiving any cash other than an advance (many never get anything else). Will Mr Miller and his employees wait 3 years to be paid for their work?

Secondly, at the moment the accounting for royalties harks back to the days when accounts were done in big ledgers with quill pens. Most publishers pay royalties once every six months, up to ten months in arrears. So you don’t receive money you’ve earned on a book in July 2008 until April 2009. The other publishers are even worse – royalties are paid every year, so you might have to wait until September 2009 for that July 2008 earning.

If Mr Miller’s company really wants to be fair to their authors I trust they will go to monthly payments. There is no reason with modern stock control and accounting why everything can’t go through practically instantly – except that greedy publishers want to hang onto the cash as long as possible.

Some publishers moan they have to do the long wait thing because booksellers take books on sale or return, so it takes quite a while to work out whether or not books have really sold. Again, this is a pathetic argument with modern IT - but it’s also irrelevent for Mr Miller’s outfit, as they’ve announced their books won’t be sale or return – once a bookseller buys it, it’s sold.

Change is a wonderful thing – and the publishing business is certainly in need of it – but you do have to examine just what’s going on underneath those bright ideas.

At one point, Bennett describes a talk he once gave. Not expecting a huge audience for a science talk, he was unnerved to see many more seats than he expected set out. But rather than the thirty to fifty he expected, the hall was packed out, standing room only, with hundreds in the audience.

The posters advertising his talk on astronomy had accidentally been sent out with astrology as the subject matter instead.

He managed to hold and interest the audience – at least no one walked out. But it does offer an insight for those of us who try to communicate science to the general public, and not just the groan that the confusion of astronomy and astrology usually brings on.

Do we do enough to put up a subject that interests the general public, which we can then use to slip in some of the good stuff? I don’t mean actively misleading them about the content, but using appropriate mechanisms to draw them in.

That’s why I was saddened the other day to see a letter in New Scientist that slags off books in ‘The Science of’ mould. Admittedly the letter is standing up for the Science of Discworld books, but it does so by implying that the other ‘science of’ books represent a tired genre.

I think this entirely misses the point. I don’t mind what it’s ‘science of’ – someone could even be mad enough to write Science of Middle Earth – the fact is, these books are a good way to achieve that subversive ‘in’ to an audience that otherwise wouldn’t bother. I wouldn’t mind Science of Hollyoaks if it got some teenagers reading it.

Funnily enough, one of the Science of Discworld titles is by the far the worst ‘science of’ book I’ve ever read – so I’m afraid I’m doubly at odds with the New Scientist letter writer.

P.S. One last thought for all science communicators. Titles grab attention. This was originally titled The Bennett Lesson and no one seems to have paid any attention. So I’ve tried changing the title to see what will happen…

For those who like to know, all is now revealed.

1. The lucky group is completely similar; All the favourable groups keep the way unhappily he was.

Anna Karenina – Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

2. No relation of transformation of the point, in the name of the station of the work, of that that not worried, the end still to call it, one
getlteman did not live between little hour, one, of one entrerrosca and the old sample in small fine squeezes of a cremagliera of the horse and have more and more to lévier more for the packing.

Don Quixote – Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

3. The time is, the chronometers, will be false, is diffidenza the thing more better possible and the time made recently is the faith and the time, that recently is manufactured, is stupid and the batteries of the age to intelligence and the age that is to say, that it is dark amounts to this station, the winter is hopeless is desire and the force that motivates is this station of light/write.

A Tale of Two Cities – It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

4. With the yellow peripheral device unregarded Sunday and the small state in the handspike to linear of the Mollusken and in the crustaceans western in the spiral the edge that à.la.moda, that one he persecutes the water of the stagnation of the galaxy is not.

The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

5. What I interest he, when this one first special one of great eleventy finally commemorated of the personnel the edge of the main purse negotiated the anniversary, the end to announce, any many of history and the impelling mechanism and xxxx xxxx and xxxx. (Proper names removed)

The Lord of the Rings – When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

I’ve had a very helpful email conversation, first with Jason, then with Robin Hogarth, the academic who first used the problem on hapless stats experts at the University of London, who was kind enough to answer my query about the paper, which he wrote 30 years ago. Here is the problem as phrased in the original paper:

‘It is claimed that when a particular consultant says the market will rise (i.e., a favorable report), it always does rise.’

Subjects were then asked the following question: What is the minimum evidence you would need to check the consultant’s claim,

The paper states that the (obviously?) correct answer is 1 and 4, but many statisticians came up with the ‘wrong’ answer of 1 only, which I also thought was correct.

It turns out that the original problem is not stated fully in the paper (it does say that there was considerable verbal explanation accompanying it, which may have covered the missing information). As it reads, there is no suggestion that you can’t monitor the results of every prediction made by the consultant. But that isn’t what was intended to be offered.

The choice was supposed to be that you could check one instance of any or all of the checks 1 to 4. These would be sampled from the consultant’s work. What the question really should have asked was not if you could check that the consultant’s claim was true – clearly you could never prove it to be true from this sampling – but rather which of the four data would you need to check to make sure you had no evidence that countered his claim.

Then, finally, the 1 and 4 answer is correct. But as stated in the original paper, the problem isn’t effective – and that means poor old Jason, in using this example, was bound to cause confusion. He has tried to correct his book by slightly changing the wording in a later edition, but in fact the conditions to make the problem work are so messy that it just doesn’t provide an example of what he was trying to show. That’ll teach him to depend on an academic paper!

Seriously, it would be highly unfair to single out Robin Hogarth’s thirty-year-old paper, but this does illustrate once again a topic often discussed on Nature Network – there is so much that could be done to improve the quality of writing in papers. As demonstrated here, this doesn’t just impact on whether or not the paper will send you to sleep, it also can influence whether the information from the paper can be properly used.

However, I have just seen a press release that says Calvin Lord, the former deputy managing director of dyes and inks firm Wolstenholme International, has bought its glitter-making subsidiary, Ronald Britton, and combined it with Rochdale-based school supplies firm Brian Clegg to create a company which he has renamed Colourlord. (I rather like the idea of having a glitter-making subsidiary.)

I look forward to my chief rival rapidly disappearing to the historical depths of Google. Now, the world is mine! [Hysterical, Bond villain-style cackling.] Okay, I know there are other Brian Cleggs out there. But at least in the e-world it looks like I could soon be on #1. Just call me ‘sir’.

(Apologies to anyone who expects more erudition of this blog. It is Friday.)

1. The lucky group is completely similar; All the favourable groups keep the way unhappily he was.

2. No relation of transformation of the point, in the name of the station of the work, of that that not worried, the end still to call it, one
getlteman did not live between little hour, one, of one entrerrosca and the old sample in small fine squeezes of a cremagliera of the horse and have more and more to lévier more for the packing.

3. The time is, the chronometers, will be false, is diffidenza the thing more better possible and the time made recently is the faith and the time, that recently is manufactured, is stupid and the batteries of the age to intelligence and the age that is to say, that it is dark amounts to this station, the winter is hopeless is desire and the force that motivates is this station of light/write.

4. With the yellow peripheral device unregarded Sunday and the small state in the handspike to linear of the Mollusken and in the crustaceans western in the spiral the edge that à.la.moda, that one he persecutes the water of the stagnation of the galaxy is not.

5. What I interest he, when this one first special one of great eleventy finally commemorated of the personnel the edge of the main purse negotiated the anniversary, the end to announce, any many of history and the impelling mechanism and xxxx xxxx and xxxx. (Proper names removed)

(Number four is my favourite.) And your answers are?...

The website gives the example that
I’m a little tea pot, short and stout.
translates to They are a small POTENTIOMETER, short circuits and a beer of malzes of the tea.

And why not.

I managed to get this:
The time damaged in the rat between the cat. from While the cat’s away the mouse will play

Here are two classic opening sentences of novels:
The period of great est human in the current seins does not order he personally them he, to the data of the considered one wants, around indicated, to and the escapes process highly of intelligence, anybody, 19 the year last to. In order to probably believe the century,

and, somewhat easier to recognize, but highly unnerving:

The recognized truth, a simple man in the possession of a wealth is
one, being must an internal demand of the part of a woman.

... feel free to guess which books before checking at the bottom of the post.

To make your own perversions of well known phrases and sayings, slip over to this website

• The War of the Worlds (No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own)
• Pride and Prejudice (It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.)

Despite (or perhaps even because of) some scientists’ tendency to ridicule religion, the science community can’t leave it alone.

Religious matters often creep into scientific discussions when a religion comes up with something that seems illogical or unsatisfying. So for those who get a trifle bored with scientific religion bashing, I’d like to say how fed up I am with a humanist/atheist concept that manages to be a literary cliche at the same time.

A few days ago I was watching one of those Sunday evening dramas designed to be sufficiently non-challenging that it avoids indigestion after having too big a meal. (I won’t name it, for embarrassment that you know I watched it.) It was the final episode and in it a (female) baby was born. Instantly my cliche detector sprang into action. ‘What’s the betting,’ I thought, ‘that an elderly (female) person dies before the programme has finished?’ Sure enough, towards the end the ageing female character pops her clogs.

Da-dah! It’s the circle of life, something we are supposed to find reassuring and heartwarming if we haven’t a religious belief to support us.

Well, I’m sorry, it was an awful song in Lion King and it’s a useless crutch. Both my parents have died, and neither at the time nor since have I found any solace in thinking ‘yes, but a baby was probably born around the same time.’ So what?

The circle of life might not be as irritating as creationism, but it just shows it’s not just religions that can get up people’s noses. Attempts to prop up the spirit in the absence of religion can be equally irritating. And even more cliched.

I’m currently part way through Your Money and Your Brain by Jason Zweig. Subtitled Become a smarter, more successful investor the neuroscience way it’s a look at what’s happening in our brains when we react (sometimes bizarrely) to the financial markets – rather appropriate at the current time.

Here’s the stopper. According to Mr Zweig:

People were told that an expert claimed that the market always went up after he predicted it would rise. They were told they could verify the expert’s claim by choosing to observe any or all of the following evidence:

Then they were asked what was the minimum evidence they would need in order to establish for certain that the expert’s claim was true. Fully 48% of the people responded that No 1 was all they would need. Only 22% gave the correct answer: the minimum evidence needed to see whether the experts claim was true is No 1 and No 4. Even though he says the market always goes up when he predicts it will, you still need to know what he said before the market went down. (After all it does not always go up.) Subjecting him to both these tests is the only way to be positive about the truth.

Now I can’t see this. Assume we apply test 1. To require a second test, there must be a circumstance where the second test will provide information about the statement (‘the market always goes up after I predict it will rise’) that isn’t provided by the first test. I can’t think of a circumstance where this will occur.

Maybe I’m being dumb, along with the ‘professors and graduate students of the University of London’ who provided those 48% ‘wrong’ answers, but I can’t see it.

What I think Zweig means is that the after the expert says ‘the market will rise’ the market might rise, then fall without the expert saying anything else. If so, however, Zweig is incorrect to say the 48% were wrong. They correctly test the expert’s assertion. He doesn’t say ‘and it won’t go down again afterwards.’ Only test 1 is required establish what he says is true – if Mr Zweig wants to read anything into it, that’s his mistake!

If you are going to use an example to prove something it ought to prove it – and for me, this does entirely the opposite. But I am being dumb, so I’m probably missing something. Any volunteers to show me where I’m going wrong?

However, it’s a bit of a surprise to find the BBC has also produced websites that have deliberately misleading content.

This evening I was doing some general bumbling about on the web trying to find out more on British rocketry and I found not one but two sites where the topic is entirely fictional and based on a BBC drama, rather than reality, but presented as if it was a factual site.

The first is the British Experimental Rocket Group site which as long as you are aware of that science fiction TV classic Quatermass isn’t exactly hard to see through – even so, its BBC format may give it a sense of reality to some readers.

The second, which is altogether more easy to mistake for the real thing at first glance is the British Rocket Group’s Guinevere page, which starts with a realistic ‘in memoriam’ page leading to a quite convincing looking ‘previous project home page.’ Okay, anyone who knows anything about the UK and sees a ‘message from the Prime Minister’ with a picture of a woman who isn’t Margaret Thatcher will be a touch suspicious – all the more so when clicking through to it reveals it’s a message from Prime Minister Harriet Jones, a Doctor Who character – even so the site is very straight in appearance.

Now I like a good joke as much as the next person, but it does ever so slightly worry me when a body as respected for its news as the BBC puts up spoof websites. There is plenty of historical evidence from the Orson Wells War of the Worlds broadcast to the BBC’s classic April 1st joke item from the 1950s showing the spaghetti harvest that when broadcasters try a spoof it can seriously mislead, but at least the damage is very short lived in such a case.

A fake website can sit and stew long after the programme it was produced to provide marketing for has disappeared from memory, potentially misleading with few merits. It’s not even as if these sites are amusing like the infamous Bonsai Kitten site. They’re just misleading. At risk of going all bah humbug, I’m really not sure this should be encouraged.

It’s interesting to ponder how a great talent might have developed with a very small change in circumstances. Take the writer and poet T. S. Eliot. Just imagine, on a whim, his parents had decided they wanted to call him Stearny instead of Tommy, and named him Stearns Thomas Eliot instead of Thomas Stearns Eliot. It’s quite possible he would never have written what he did.

A broken man, he might never have written at all, or might just have produced weak humour in the form of lavatorial limericks. If he had still been a great writer, The Wasteland would probably have been one of his more cheerful works.

Why such a change from a simple switch of name order?

Try spelling S. T. Eliot backwards.

It was particularly entertaining when presenter John Humphreys started to panic as a researcher described an experiment involving sexual arousal in rather too much detail. ‘This is Britain,’ he said to the American researcher. ‘This isn’t just Britain this is Radio Four!’

Sadly I had to turn off part way through, so I don’t know if they described my favourite example of human irrationality. It’s a situation where you can offer someone money for nothing, and they will turn it down.

It’s a great game (in the game theory sense). Two people are given a sum of money – say £100. The first person has the option of splitting the money however he or she likes between the two of them (with a minimum of £1 each). The second person can then say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the deal. If (s)he says ‘yes’, each gets the split of money determined by the first person. If the answer is ‘no’, neither of them gets anything.

Logically, the second person should always say ‘yes’. It doesn’t matter what the split is, they are getting money for nothing. In practice, they don’t say ‘yes’ unless they are offered around 30% of the money (the percentage varies between different cultures). If the first person offers a derisory amount (say £99 for me, £1 for you), the second person tends to turn the offer down to spite them for being mean.

There is an effect here the researchers rarely seem to mention. I think if the amount was boosted way beyond the budget of economists/psychologists and Bill Gates was running this experiment, so the amounts were £100 million to be split, a minimum of £1 million each, people would take the offer, however mean. I suspect you would only reject an amount that was less than (say) one day’s wages.

Even so, it’s a great demonstration of how an apparantly simple decision with a positive outcome (I will be given money for nothing) can be distorted by emotion.

One was this:

(Hosted by Flickr)

... a book I’d never heard of. Could this be another Brian Clegg? Or a Brian Clegg forgery?

Turns out, I did write it (in my pre-science writing days). I’d written a book called Instant Motivation. This was a (legal) version of it by an Indian publisher, who had changed the title. But no one had bothered to tell me. I’m only an author, after all.

A surprise – but quite pleasant really…

First misleading words. We were told that ‘the majority of children who fail [to achieve expected targets] in SATS tests in junior school have dyslexia.’ What percentage does that suggest? It was actually 55% – technically a majority, but not what’s usually meant when someone says ‘the majority of people do this or that’.

Secondly a representative of a dyslexia charity Xtraordiary People showed a strange naiveity. She sounded offended when the presenter suggested that some people consider that dyslexia is sometimes used as an excuse label for someone who is either lazy or not particularly academic.

I’m sorry, such offence is entirely unrealistic. Talk to any teacher and they will tell you that a good number of pushy middle class parents whose children under-achieve insist their children have dyslexia – even if they are in the above 45%. This isn’t saying dyslexia doesn’t exist or isn’t an important problem, but it’s silly to pretend this doesn’t happen, because it does.

Taking this line doesn’t help gain support for dyslexia – it’s much better to be honest.

However I was genuinely shocked by a couple of the Vatican’s new ‘go to hell, go directly to hell’ sins. I don’t mind making sins out of drug trafficking, or even environmental pollution (though Henry should be worried about his skip). But two of them were ‘bioethical violations’ such as birth control, and ‘morally dubious experiments’ like stem cell research. Nice one, Vatican. Now when right wing politicians mutter about ‘damned scientists’ they will be speaking literally.

I think the tumble dryer is a classic example of the sort of product that shouldn’t be improved but done away with. Not because of its impact on the environment (though that’s bad enough), but because it is the answer to the wrong question.

Instead of asking ‘how can I dry my wet clothes?’ maybe we should ask ‘how can we prevent clothes from getting wet?’ What we really want is clothes you just shake and the dirt and any water falls off, so there’s no need for all this washing and drying business.

I’m reminded of my youthful days back at British Airways when one of my colleagues, Chris Brown, pointed out a similar flaw with an advertising campaign for a shampoo. It said it was so gentle you could use it every day without damaging your hair. Chris pointed out he didn’t want shampoo he could use every day. Washing your hair is a total waste of time. What he wanted was shampoo you used once, then didn’t need to wash your hair again for another year…

I see in the results of a survey published today that 8 out of 10 of us admit to using the likes of Blackberries and laptops in bed. It has to stop. Seriously – you need some disconnected time. Put them away. Switch them off. Give your brain a chance – preferably with a good read. (Come on, it was World Book Day in the UK yesterday.)

We also learn that while the most popular nightwear for women is pyjamas, one per cent of men questioned claim to wear a nightie.

The only slight suspicion I might have is that I happen to have taken part in this survey, and while I give it all my attention and think hard before giving my answers, it wouldn’t surprise me if others just skip through, giving answers almost at random. Although I always tell the truth in such things, I equally do my best to give the answers within that band of approximate verity which are most different from the ones the survey writers are pushing for, just for the fun of it.

‘Pushing for?’ you say. ‘Surely surveys give an unbiassed view of the public’s opinion?’ Did you never watch Yes Prime Minister? Take a look at this if you didn’t see the survey episode.

(I gather, ironically, this is only World Book Day here in the UK and one or two other places, as the official date falls on school holidays, and school teachers like the excuse to do silly things. At the place my wife works, they’ve all gone into school in pyjamas to celebrate World Book Day. I love education.)

I want to take the opportunity to celebrate the books that got me interested in science. These weren’t popular science books. The genre was in its infancy back then. They were science fiction.

In literary circles SF gets a lot of stick, but I rejoice in the way it expanded my horizons and made me think. It would be impossible to pick out a favourite, but I’d like to highlight a handful of very special contributors to the stimulation of my interest in science:

Isaac Asimov – The Foundation Trilogy – okay, the characters are solid wood, but it’s packed with ideas and sense of wonder. I can’t help but think the whole psychohistory thing got me interested in Operational Research.

James Blish – Flying Cities Quartet – very influential on me as a youth. Again combines amazing ideas and a huge, dramatic sweep.

Pohl & Kornbluth – The Space Merchants – funny, insightful and cutting.

Keith Roberts – Pavane – wonderfully thought provoking alternative history, set in a Britain with no Reformation.

... I could go on indefinitely. Good SF stimulates the imagination and the excitement of science. That can’t be bad.

By all means rush out and by a big pile of popular science books for world book day (see the Popular Science website for recommendations) – but give science fiction a thought too. At its best, it is glorious.

Now that’s fine and good. We don’t want too many fried villagers. But every time I see one of these signs it grates on me. It just doesn’t sound like English. ‘Danger of dying,’ yes, that would be fine. But ‘Danger of death’? It just doesn’t work for me, however technically correct the grammar may be.

I was recently trying to get some information on hybrid cars from manufacturers’ websites, and THEY ARE TERRIBLE. (Not hybrid cars, the websites.)

Sorry for shouting, I lost my cool there.

The trouble is the sites are so pathetically slow. They cram in so much high tech wizzy web stuff with video and music and interactive this and 360 degree that, that the whole experience of using them is slow and painful, and it can take forever to find a simple bit of information.

Please, car manufacturers, have two sites. One for the brain dead who want to play with pretty interactive graphics, and one for people who need to find things out. Surely it can’t be too difficult…

Some while ago, Vera Duckworth, a long lasting character in the UK’s oldest TV soap, Coronation Street, died. For non-UK readers, the Street is quite an institution in the UK, broadcast since 1960, and this character had been on the show for decades.

After the character’s death, her screen husband said to another character something like ‘snowdrops were her favourite flower. Every time you look at a snowdrop, think of Vera.’

Now just across the road from our house is a bank with about 5 million snowdrops on it, and it really does work. Every time I see them, it reminds me of this little soap moment and the character.

We get so used to computers we tend to think of human memory in the same, linearly structured way as the digital variety, but of course it isn’t. It is so much easier to lock in a human memory if it’s associated with images, however tenuously, as this example demonstrates (anyone who has seen the show would realize that Vera Duckworth and a delicate little snowdrop don’t provide a natural association). Nice one, whoever wrote the episode, though part of me hopes that by next snowdrop time this link will have faded away.

Quick aside – there’s an interesting disparity between the audience of the soap, which I’d guess is biassed towards the middle aged, and the makers’ aspirations as demonstrated by the website, which seems to be aimed at 18 to 25s. Don’t they know all 18 to 25s spend every evening binge drinking, and so are never there to watch soap operas? Get with it, ITV.

I was, however, a little unnerved by a leaflet at the checkout. I’m used to supermarkets offering me loans, savings accounts, electricity, phones and more, but here’s one I’m not in a hurry to put in the basket:

(Hosted by flickr)

I won’t even begin to contemplate on how you add value (or values) to a funeral.

New Scientist (the UK’s top science weekly for the general reader) has a habit of promising and not delivering.

When I see headlines like Coming Next Week – special report – The Dark Side – 96 per cent of the universe is invisible to us. We’re about to find out why I’m filled with dread.

Practically every time one of their headlines suggests an answer to a big science issue (or that a major theory has been overturned), it turns out the story is describing some marginal new theory that hasn’t been accepted by the mainstream and usually never will. It’s such a disappointment! (Dare I say it, even Nature does this sometimes.)

We’re always moaning about how newspapers and TV misrepresent science – it’s unfortunate that while the body text of articles in New Scientist don’t do this, the headlines have a tendency to.

I know you want to grab people’s attention. Really unlikely theory might possibly offer an alternative to the existence of black holes (or whatever) doesn’t grab the imagination like Black Holes Don’t Exist! – but I’m sure the balance isn’t right at the moment.

I don’t mind the puns – keep them up, NS and Nature both – but let’s have more honest headlines. (Oh and can we forget spin-off books about carbonizing your ferret for a bit too, please.)

Hmm. This sounds about the best science-related economic non-sequitor since Richard Dawkins’ infamous claim that people who say they have psi abilities must be fake because if they were real they would have volunteered to be lab rats, rather than making money out of it.

Some don’t install home micro-generation (for example solar panels and turbines) because it’s not practical in/on their homes – but the biggest reason is that it costs too much money with a long, long wait before there’s any return on investment.

If the government really want micro-generation, I’d like to suggest an alternative approach. Reduce the number of planned new power stations by one, and use the millions saved to install free micro-generation for anyone who wants it and can accommodate it.

What’s the catch? The homeowner doesn’t get the savings (okay, we can allow them 5 or 10 percent as an incentive) until the investment in equipment is paid off. But with that small incentive, plus a future significant saving when the capital has been paid, it would be attractive to householders too. How about it, government energy folk?

The idea was to take a rampant professor round a supermarket and she would highlight what made scientific sense, and what didn’t, from the claims for the various products. Ace.

The professor herself was a bit of a let-down, because she was an professor of obstetrics. I’ve nothing against the medical profession, and we’ve the wonderous Ben Goldacre who manages to be both a doctor and a great spotter of scientific no-nos, but I suppose I was expecting a ‘real’ scientific professor. But that’s just a physics degree talking.

It started well with the Prof. laying into statements based on too small a trial and such like sins. Then, however, the programme did its own test, on superfruits. This involved five (yes, five!) sets of twins, one of which ate extra portions of ordinary fruits, the other extra portions of superfruits. They compared changes in the vitamin levels in their blood afterwards.

Now I’ve got at least three problems with this. The ridiculous sample size. The total lack of even single blind conditions. And the test didn’t seem even to be looking for what superfruit enthusiasts claim is their main benefits – rises in anti-oxidant levels. Did the Prof. mention any of these shortcomings? No.

Later on, checking out the merits of organics there were two strange happenings. First, the Prof said there were no large scale trials showing nutritional benefits for organics, instead briefly dismissing a couple of trials, small by implication, that had contradictory results.

From a comment made during an interview, it seems likely the programme was made last June/July, which would mean at least some segments were filmed before the outcome of the major EU/Newcastle University trial published in October. Yet it seems remiss of the programme makers not to mention this, instead leaving the public with the opinion there were still no large scale trials.

A little later, the Prof. compared welfare standards at Eastbrook Farm (just down the road from me), a big organic farm, and a conventional factory-style farm. This comparison seemed wrong. She should surely have compared welfare on a non—organic but still free range farm (there’s one practically next door to Eastbrook), to see if the organic part made a difference, but chose instead to include extra variables. This was supposed to be testing whether organics’ welfare systems are any better, but ended up comparing two different things.

All in all, I wasn’t happy. Am I too fussy? I don’t think so. The BBC’s flagship science programme, specifically trying to be scientific about these product claims, could have done a lot better.

She got it right, but then asked ‘Yes, but why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why does a north pole repel a north pole, but attract a south pole?’

And suddenly you realize what a thin surface covering our science knowledge is. I could go one more layer down, but very soon the answer to ‘why?’ is ‘because they do!’

As this is the home of my blog, as well as many outpourings that do have great value in thinking about science, I’m encouraged to blog today. Of course, whenever you are told to write a blog entry, rather than being inspired by the world, nothing comes to mind. Sigh.

So I’ll just send NN a Valentine, and some virtual sweeties that it can enjoy in electronic secret pleasure.

A number of years ago I was on an Underground station in London. With nothing better to do (it was probably the Circle line – there’s often nothing better to do on the Circle line) I was people watching.

For some reason I looked at the office, situated part way down the platform. There was someone inside, talking to an LT official. The person in question had his back to me, and was a good distance away, yet I instally recognized him as an ex-colleague from British Airways called Alan Ainsworth.

I couldn’t hear him, I couldn’t see his face, but I recognized him purely by his movements. This wasn’t a person I was expecting to see – I hadn’t seen him for several years, and I didn’t associate him with Central London.

Admittedly it was a one-off, but if I was able to recognize someone in such difficult conditions, maybe it would provide easier metrics than some of the other recognition technologies.

Every community has a group it is traditional to make fun of (hopefully in a warm, friendly manner). On a country basis, it tends to be the inhabitants of another nearby country (e.g. the ancient tradition of Irish jokes in the UK), or a particular state or county (or even nearby town) in your own country.

But these jokes aren’t just geographical. In the orchestra, for instance, I gather viola players tend to be the butt of such jokes.

Now I offer you the scientist’s equivalent.

A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer were trying to work out of all odd numbers above one were prime.

‘3, 5, 7, 9… no they’re not all primes,’ says the mathematician. ‘Nine is divisible by three.’

‘3, 5, 7, 9… hmm, experimental error… 11, 13 – yes, I can hypothesize that they are all primes,’ says the physicist.

Now it’s the engineer’s turn. ‘Three,’ he says, ‘Erm, erm, five, erm, erm…’

I had to wonder, did David change his name to the hyphenated one to celebrate his job, or was he landed with this monicker from birth, so had little choice in his chosen profession?

I mean the power car was called this, by the way. I have no idea what the nameplate was called. (Acknowledgements to Lewis Carroll.)

It’s not because I once was rather anti-organic, consciously avoiding organic produce. I thought it was pretentious and based on pseudo-science, even though I never went as far as Dick Taverne in his book The March of Unreason.

But I am convinced of the benefits of fresh, local vegetables, there is some evidence of nutritional benefits from organic cultivation, and I get the veg delivered to the door for less than it would cost to buy at the supermarket.

However, the downside of the veg box is that every time I venture into Sainsbury’s, I’m buying the unhealthy stuff. I watch a conveyor load without a single vegetable, and feel really guilty, as anyone watching must think ‘what sort of ignorant junk food addict is he?’

You just can’t win.

A dietician, a geneticist and a physicist are arguing about how to produce the perfect racehorse.

‘It’s easy,’ says the dietician. ‘Just make sure it eats the right things from birth.’

‘No,’ says the geneticist. ‘You’ve got to breed over a number of generations to get the right traits.’

‘Well,’ says the physicist, ‘let’s assume the racehorse is a sphere…’

It seemed an excellent idea – there isn’t enough coverage of the Nobels. It did strike me briefly it could be about the Olympic Games, but you wouldn’t n