REVISIT SERIES: A post from July 2014 -  Each week I'm going to include a post from years ago that I feel is worth revisiting: I feel the strong urge to share with you what may be the worst piece of science-based reporting I've seen this year. It's from UK free newspaper Metro and it is titled  Red head? Climate change could make you and your ginger compatriots EXTINCT . (The usually respectable Independent also covered this 'story.') It may not be obvious now, but as the slightly younger picture of me above demonstrates, I am a member of this apparently endangered grouping. But what does the story say exactly? I will extract some of it's joyfulness, so you don't have to read it (though admittedly in the original you get a picture of Lily Cole rather than me). The suggestion is that due to climate change and the 'rapidly increasing temperature across the British Isles, the red hair gene could soon be a thing of the past.' And the way we are ...

The BBC is, of course, a broadcaster rather than a publisher - yet its website, and particularly its news website, should surely be treated as if it were a publication. That being the case, it's time they got someone involved who knows how to lay out text. All too often their articles look as if they've been taken straight off the autocue. Look at the start of the 'article' from political editor, Chris Mason illustrated above. The whole thing is more than twice as long as the extract shown - and pretty well the only paragraph that has more than one sentence in it is a quote. It's horrendous. I find it really difficult to read. Please, someone at the BBC, get your act together.  Alternatively you might like to approach the Royal Literary Fund . They're really good at helping students and organisations with their writing skills - it's clear that the BBC needs some assistance as soon as possible.

To get into this topic I have to admit to a guilty pleasure - when I want to have a totally undemanding half hour in front of the TV to unwind, I rather enjoy the quiz show, Pointless . But the last episode I watched made me think that C. P. Snow's ' Two cultures ' is alive and well on the BBC. In 1959, Snow explored the painful divide between the science and the arts - and the imbalance in that divide culturally. He pointed out that while we expect scientists to appreciate the arts - and the vast majority do - those from the 'arts' side of the divide (which includes most broadcasters and journalists) considered it almost a badge of honour that they knew nothing about the sciences. In many ways (and, dare I say it, in part due to good popular science books and broadcasting) that divide is weaker than it once was - but Pointless presenter Alexander Armstrong (a man with an English degree) demonstrated painfully that there is still a strong support for this sad...

I rarely see the Daily Telegraph , but at the weekend I was at the house of someone who takes it. I couldn't help become a little incensed at an opinion piece by someone called Christopher Booker, bemoaning the 'dumbing up' of University Challenge. Given the proximity to the world marches for science, I couldn't help comment on the piece. Famously, C. P. Snow once made a big thing of the 'two cultures' of the arts and sciences, pointing out that people from the arts side expected a well-educated person to have a good knowledge of the arts, but themselves expressed a kind of smug satisfaction in their ignorance of the sciences. I could be wrong, but it's difficult not to read Booker's use of 'particularly' as essentially saying 'I expect everyone to have a good knowledge of the arts, but having a good knowledge of the sciences is for specialist weirdos.' The reality is that the science questions are no more specialist than the arts on...

According to news reports , the bank HSBC will allow customers to choose from a whole range of gender neutral titles such as Mx, Ind, M, Mre, and Misc. Some may moan about political correctness gone mad - I would argue it doesn't go any where near far enough. Why do we need to give organisations our 'title' at all? As far as I can see the only point of using a title is to establish your place in a feudal society - they really should have no place today. Whenever I fill in an online form I leave the title box untouched - yet all too often, the organisation makes it a non-optional selection. I don't want them to label me. It really irritates me, for example, when the programme for an event calls me Mr Brian Clegg. I'm not Mr Brian Clegg. I am Brian Clegg. And why someone who is, say, having a one-off online relationship with me should need a title is baffling. Some of you may be thinking, 'Ah, but if you don't give a title, they can't write to you fo...

I'm not a great fan of political correctness (PC) when it comes to some of its current excesses, such as getting all worked up about Mexican restaurants handing out sombreros. However, if there's one man who can single-handedly push me into the PC camp, it's 'journalist' Kelvin MacKenzie. I am proud to say that I have never bought a copy of the Sun newspaper, but my favourite paper, the i , has a daily 'News Matrix' section where it quotes snippets from other papers, and I came across this impressive rant from MacKenzie: For far too long, the PC brigade have got away with it. Nothing derogatory can be said about multiculturalism, the excesses of "feminism", climate change, the poor and their responsibilities to stand on their own two feet. I don't know where to start on that sloppy bit of writing. Firstly it's poorly written for something published in a national newspaper. It shouldn't be 'the PC brigade have ' but rather ...

The moon (in case you aren't sure what we're talking about). Image from Wikipedia A seriously dodgy statistic from that renowned historian of science Cherie Blair, just had me jumping up and down in the coffee shop. She proclaimed in an article in the i newspaper: 'It took less than 40 years to put a man on the moon.' 'Really? did it really? And how the heck did you work that out?' I nearly shouted. Leaving aside whether or not it should have been 'fewer than 40 years', let's try to pin it down. The first manned moon landing was 1969, so assuming 'less than 40' is 30-39 years that puts us approximately between 1930 and 1939. I'm struggling to find anything that fits that date. Tsiolkovsky's Investigation of Outer Space Rocket Devices was published in 1903, Goddard was flying rockets by 1915 and published his paper A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes , where he suggested a rocket would reach the moon 5 years later. And, ...

A shop - contains checkout queues I've done a fair amount of work on queuing in my time, which is why I was very doubtful to see a Metro headline 'Why you're better queuing behind one person with a full trolley than people with baskets.' And I had good reason to be doubtful, because the argument was, well, total rubbish. 'Do you queue behind the person with a trolley filled to the brim, or do you wait behind the line of people in the "10 items or fewer" queue?' the article asked. Then it introduced Dan Meyer 'a former high school maths teacher' (a queuing expert, then), whose research tells us that transactions have a fixed time of 41 seconds, plus 3 seconds per item scanned. 'This means,' says the article, 'that queuing behind a line of people who have fewer things will take longer than a couple of people with full trolleys'. Again, I'm afraid, this is total garbage. The article points out that one person buying ...

Perhaps because of my Northern working class family background, I struggle when presented with what appears to be pretentiousness. I know, for instance, that caviar is a horrible, salty waste of money, I prefer a good draught beer to wine with a meal, and I have real trouble with the literary scene. The vast majority of the time I prefer to read genre fiction, whether crime or SF, rather than reading literary fiction. I'd go further - I think good genre writing is better fiction than most literary fiction. So I have real mixed feelings about seeing the quotes alongside in the Adam Roberts book By Light Alone , which I recently reviewed . On the one hand I absolutely agree that Roberts is a brilliant writer. And I think it's true that the literary types (I would hardly describe them as mainstream (or even 'mainstram') will pick up on Roberts just as they did, for instance, with Ray Bradbury, and will do all their power to try to persuade themselves and the rest of ...

Thanks to Eric Doyle on Facebook, I came across an article written by Janelle Quibuyen, who was complaining that 'quitting your job to pursue your passion is bullshit.' I'm afraid it was a piece that totally missed the point of working for yourself. And as someone who made the shift 20 years ago, and hasn't had a proper job since, I wanted to stick up for those who take the plunge. Firstly, it is important to say something about the 'your passion' part of 'pursuing your passion', which seems not to have occurred to the author of the article. Just because you are passionate about something doesn't mean you are good at it. Few passionate football fans are potential professionals. Shows like The X-Factor demonstrate the gap that can exist between enthusiasm and ability all too clearly. So to make this kind of thing work, you need to be objectively sure that you are at least competent. Don't rely on your own opinion or that of your friends and ...

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

A couple of days ago I blogged about the suspicious nature of very short five star reviews. However, a recent revelation, pointed out by the excellent author Sara Crowe , has made me want to return to the whole business of reviewing - specifically what reviews are for and how, as authors, we ought to respond to them. On the matter of what reviews for, I was struck by a response to my earlier post. Someone said 'Most Amazon "reviews" are not actually reviews anyway, they're about whether or not the reader liked the book, which is something different.' I'm not sure I agree with that sentiment. I'd certainly agree that there's little point a review just saying whether or not a reader liked the book - but I do think it's an important part of the mix. Some while ago I moaned to a major science journal that did book reviews that their reviews were terrible because they never told you if the book was any good at what it purported to do. All each r...

Like many authors I have a toe in social media - not just this blog (and the associated Google+), but Twitter and Facebook (and LinkedIn) too. I do have some useful social interaction on Facebook, but my Facebook page is dedicated to business - in my case, letting people know about science, writing and my books. Fair enough, and Facebook positively encourages this, providing opportunities to advertise both your page and specific posts to interested parties. I've never bothered with this - I do a bit of Google advertising in the vain hope that it will push up visibility in the search listings, but Facebook advertising seems like money down the drain. However, the other day I had a post I thought would be benefit from a wider audience so I thought I'd invest the price of a cup of coffee in a couple of days promotion. Off it duly went to the Facebook censors... only to be rejected fairly smartly because it 'breached guidelines'. Apparently, the image in my 'adve...

I knew it was a mistake the moment I pressed the 'Send' button. I knew they would treat me like someone pointing out (spoken in nasal tones): 'You do realise, in you drama on Sunday, that a commuter train from Slough in 1967 would not included that kind of carriage, which wasn't introduced until 1968?' But I did it anyway. Here's the thing. I had watched an episode of the BBC's police drama New Tricks , a painless, brainless way of spending an hour that is to, say, The Bridge , what a McDonalds coffee is to a serious barista product. One of the suspects in the show was a physicist. Fair enough. Even physicists can be obnoxious, as he certainly was. But they showed him in his lab. This was a physicist working on antimatter. And what did we see in the lab? Chemical glassware, and him playing with cylinders of blue liquid. Wearing protective goggles. I just had to moan. See the physicist at work So I went through the BBC's byzantine complaint form...

Here's what happens if you type a properly formatted phone number into many a web form. The error message in red appears. In my dim distant past I did quite a lot of work on the design of the user interface between people and computers - how you interact with a computer (or these days, often, the web) - and it shocks me how stupid most software still is. When I first programmed computers professionally I soon started exploring ways to make the interaction more friendly. My earliest work pre-dated graphic user interface. The user had to type commands into a console. And, surprise surprise, people made mistakes. So I put in a little routine to capture when errors occurred to see what they were typing wrong and then modified the software so it would cope with the most obvious mistakes. This isn't rocket science. Computers are much better at sorting out basic errors than people are, as long as they are pointed in the right direction. Let me give you two examples. In the ...

The Daily Mail 's ongoing mission to boldly assign everything we eat or drink into the categories 'causes cancer' or 'cures cancer' is a cause of much amusement, but essentially harmless. However, its latest magnificent misunderstanding when it comes to science could actually cause serious harm. A couple of days ago a Mail travel reporter (note they didn't let their science person, if they have one, anywhere near it) gave us the striking headline shown above (spot the typo). You will note there is no suggestion that there is no known scientific reason why this stuff should work - we are told straight 'just a teaspoon will offer three hours' protection' and apparently with a straight face that it causes your skin to vibrate and cancel out ultraviolet light. The article goes on to explain that the liquid sunscreen, retailing at £17 a bottle, works, according to its manufacturer, as follows: 'If 2 mls are ingested an hour before sun exposure,...

I agree with Dave (sort of) I will be honest, this does not come easy to me, but I sort of agree with David Cameron about something. Don't get over-excited, I have not gone over to the dark side. George Osborne is still not on my Christmas card list. But I did get rather irritated about the flak Cameron received for daring to suggest that the UK is a Christian nation. The critics point out that most of us aren't practising Christians, and this is true, but entirely misses the point. The enthusiasts for multiculturalism, no doubt the same ones who bemoan Cameron's remarks, are always quick to say that we ought to encourage everyone to cherish their cultural heritage, not to forget it. And to suggest that our cultural heritage in the UK is not Christian is perverse. Of course Cameron got it wrong in the detail. He should have said CofE not Christian as they aren't identical concepts, and that's what is central to our cultural heritage. And of course it isn...

Would you buy a used weather system from this man? I was listening to Lord Lawson on the radio this morning, doing his usual climate change denial thing (though he was being very careful to always refer to it as 'global warming', as the kind of weather we have at the moment is not one many would associate with warming). And in his voice was all the fervour of an old-time religionist. He knows that global warming doesn't exist, and he wants us all to share in his beliefs. It made me wonder, why he believes something so fervently in the face of the evidence. By evidence, by the way, I don't mean the current flooding in the UK, though of course it may be indeed influenced by climate change. We can't deduce anything from a single data point. I mean the big picture. And when you think about it, his response is very similar to the way that creationists cling onto their beliefs that, say dinosaurs co-existed with humans and were on the ark in a great flood where th...

What's happening here? Whatever it is, it's not worth examining I had the pleasure last week of speaking at event for heads of science from secondary schools in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Before my own session I sat in on their get-together where they were primarily discussing the many and byzantine changes to the exam system that the government and Mr Gove's latest whims have brought about. Two things struck me as an outsider. One was that, rather than simplifying the exam system, every change seemed to make it more complicated. Rather like the way the tax system has got more and more complex over the years, the exam system, particularly once you take in GCSEs, iGCSE equivalents, GCE, BTEC, requirements for the eBac, the three buckets* etc etc has become a tangled mess. Frankly both could do with a 'start again from the beginning', though I accept that the last thing teachers need is yet another upheaval. However one specific thing stuck out like the ver...

Anyone who knows anything about the battle to preserve rationality in supporting the theory of evolution against marauding creationism will know of the 1925 Scopes trial - or 'the infamous Scopes monkey trial' as it is often known. What I didn't realize until reading John Grant's excellent rallying cry for embattled reason, Denying Science , was that the whole Scopes trial was a publicity stunt. It's not that there wasn't a serious issue to be fought. The trigger was the signing of an act prohibiting the teaching of evolution in universities and schools in Tennessee. But the Scopes trial was apparently one of those good ideas that civic leaders have when they've had a drink or three down the local saloon. Apparently the dignitaries of Dayton, where the trial took place, spotted that any such trial would bring a lot of cash into town. So they got together both the prosecution and the defence, and looked for a likely candidate as defendant. Scopes, a gen...