This morning I spotted an email from my local theatre that was too good not to share, as it appeared to be selling off a comedian. As you do, when I tweeted about this I included the Twitter address (handle? ID? none of them work well) of the comedian in question, Ross Noble, and I noticed that, like a fair number of famousish people,  (presumably the ones that aren't rich enough to buy the person who already has, in this case, @rossnoble) he has resorted to putting 'real' in front of his name, making him @realrossnoble. There are plenty of others - David Mitchell (the comedian, not the novelist) is @RealDMitchell, for instance. I assume this has happened because someone else called Ross Noble, David Mitchell (still not the novelist) etc. has already snapped up the simple form, like my @brianclegg. It's fine, obviously, to modify your name to be both memorable and still clearly like to your name - much better, certainly than @rossnoble99 or @nobleross. But...

I do like something irritating to wake my brain up on a Monday morning, and today the best newspaper in the UK (genuinely), the i , managed to do this with a double whammy. They ran a story in which the only 'news' was that an astronaut's dad had said something stupid, and then had the nerve to label the story 'science'. The entire basis for the story was a comment from the father of British astronaut-to-be, Tim Peake. His father, Nigel, is quoted as saying 'I'm more worried about him driving home on the M27. That's far more dangerous, believe me, than going up there.' So, in what sense is this news or science? The only vaguely scientific thing in the story was the extreme misuse of statistics, which we'll examine in a moment, and though I'd rather we had astronauts in the news than X-Factor winners (I'm pleased to say that I neither know nor care who won), I really have very little interest in Nigel. I'm sorry Nigel, but I d...

More important than games There was a lot of fuss in some sections of the news recently about runner Mo Farah having problems because someone pushing a child's buggy in the park where Mo was trying to train wouldn't get off the path to keep out of Mo's way. Now I'm sure Mo is a nice guy, and was very polite, and there certainly shouldn't have been the fight that ensued. But I also am sure that the media outrage that poor old Mo had to suffer so much by not having the path to himself because of this unreasonable father was ridiculous. Let's get the picture in perspective. Mo is very good at a game, the playground game of 'Who can run fastest?' He's one of the best people in the world at this particular game, and that's lovely for him. But compared with keeping a baby or toddler safe, it is a totally worthless activity. It's fine in its place. If he had been training on a running track and the father and started pushing his pushch...

The interview that started it all I recently had the privilege of interviewing Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg for the Observer . One of the commenters for the online version remarked 'If only the world took more interest in Physics Nobel Laureates and less interest in celebrity lives/murders or royal baby bumps.' Ah, so true. And I couldn't help thinking what a science version of the celebrity gossip magazine Heat - perhaps called Thermodynamics!  - would be like. I think, in all fairness to our favourite scientists, it would be rather dull. The commenter was making the point that scientists are more worthy than celebrities because they have actually done something amazing, rather than just being known for being known. However, if you turn this around, you can see there's a fatal flaw in the reasoning that would condemn Thermodynamics! before it got off the ground. Because, on the whole, we don't know scientists. It's not that they don't hav...

Not the picture in question. But a good one - whoever painted it. We often hear moaning about how TV has exposed us to the cult of celebrity, where people are valued simply for being famous, not for what they produce or perform. I think it's very short sighted to blame TV - the real culprit is the traditional arts, which no doubt would snootily blame TV, but actually started this cult of celebrity long before Logie Baird came on the scene. Take a point of example. We have recently heard that a 'fake' picture allegedly by Leonardo da Vinci could be real. If this is the case, the picture, which last sold for £14,000 'could be worth millions.' Now either this is a great work of art or it isn't. If it's great, it should be worth a lot of money. If it's not, it shouldn't. Why does it matter whose name is attached to it? That's just a matter of celebrity, as much as paying money for the rights to Kerry Katona's latest exploits. Who made the p...

'Gino and the Rat' sounds like a good title for an age 4-8 story book, but followers of celeb events in the UK will realize immediately that we are dealing instead with an incident important enough to make it onto the main news bulletins. Rumour started spreading yesterday that TV chef and winner of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here Gino d'Acampo was in jail for the terrible crime of killing a rat. Immediately the political correctness hackles rose. After all, rats are vermin. Killing a rat is our right - and in his case he killed it to eat it, so it's doubly okay. When the initial panic settled down it turned out that the effervescent Gino was not in jail at all, but on his way back home to the UK. However the Australian authorities were considering charges. Still enough to get those hackles up? I'm not sure. In fact, once you look beyond the over-reaction, it's a good spotlight to throw on the nature of reality TV shows. On the one hand, what d'Acamp...

There's a remarkable story in the news at the moment. American science enthusiast Richard Heene had a large helium balloon tethered in his garden. The balloon escaped, which was kind of sad, but suddenly this blossomed into a potential tragedy. According to one of Heene's children, his six-year-old son was 'in' the balloon. What followed was a couple of hours of tense live TV until the balloon landed with no one inside, and the boy was found in the attic. But was this a terrible accident that nearly happened, or a very successful publicity stunt? This might seem an insensitive question, but it's fuelled by two things. The family had already been on a reality TV show (Wife Swap), and the boy in the attic apparently said he heard his family searching for him, but kept quiet because his parents 'said that we did this for a show.' We have to ask, was it realistic to imagine the boy was carried away 'in' the balloon? Or for that matter, would any...