Skip to main content

Posts

A PR triumph

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

Billiard balls and time

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

Why is an insect like a leased aircraft?

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

When is 99% less than 99%?

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

The surprising views of Fred Hoyle

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

Book and talk news

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

Death by Dandruff - Nicholas Sercombe (and Arthur Conan Doyle) ***

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