I was stunned to read that the German government has decided to shut down all its nuclear power plants in the wake of the Fukushima incident. Not surprised, because this kind of knee-jerk reaction is the kind of thing I expect of politicians, but appalled nonetheless. This is, in my opinion, the politics of superstition. Why superstition? Superstition is basically a failure to understand probability, risk and causality. When a group of bad things happen, even it they have no causal link, our gut feel's inability to deal with randomness and probability - in that case the nature of clustering - means we look for someone to blame. Like a witch, or a phone mast. In the case of nuclear power stations we are dealing with something scary - radiation - which most of us don't understand and we go into full superstitious mode. Let us just put this all into perspective. As I've mentioned before , radiation is a natural thing - the sort of thing the Soil Assocation is usually all ...

I've always found Jeremy Clarkson very amusing, but rather along 'man you love to hate' lines. However recently I have been saying to myself more and more 'I agree with Jeremy.' I was kindly bought a copy of his latest musings for Christmas and have been reading these, all too often thinking 'Hmm, he's got a point.' Not only do I seem to have almost identical tastes in popular beat combos (mostly of the prog rock variety), we share a sole superstition. Or to be precise we are both not superstitious, but both greet single magpies (he salutes them, I say 'Good morning/good afternoon.') I really don't know why I started - I think it's because I'm fond of the magpie augury - but once you have, as JC (as I like to call him) points out, it's very hard to stop. There's no point saying 'Surely a rational person like you doesn't believe in this rubbish.' I refer you to the great physicist Niels Bohr. When asked why he h...

I've just been reading an interesting new book called Science 1001 ( See at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com ). The idea of the book is to cover all of science in 1001 easily digestible topics. Some of them are on obvious subjects - like Newton's laws. Others less so. I was particularly struck by the entry on luck. This asks why some people seem to have an endless supply of luck while others are sadly lacking. Apparently Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, has found out that people who rate themselves as lucky are often extroverts, while those who think themselves unlucky are often introverts, whose self-doubt holds them back. It's certainly true that creativity and getting on in life is, to some extent, a Pygmalion effect. If you believe your ideas are rubbish, you won't tell anyone about them, and you won't try to put them into practice. But I have two problems with the theory as presented. Firstly, self-doubt and introversion are...

I was walking past a row of houses yesterday which, unusually, were numbered sequentially, because there was no 'other side of the street.' This made it blatantly obvious that the numbering went 11,12,14,15... there was no number 13. I gather this is fairly common now, but I'm not sure why. The house I lived in until age 11 was number 13 (Birch Road, to be precise) and a good time was had by all. As far as I'm aware it is still there and hasn't been struck by lightning. If superstition really is so important to house buyers, I'm surprised builders get away with the gap. The composer Gustav Mahler famously didn't have a symphony labelled number 9 as he thought this was doomed to be his last symphony - so he went from the eighth to the tenth (admittedly via a piece that had the word 'symphonie' in its title)... and promptly died before he could finish it. There's a distinct suspicion that house number 14 is really number 13 when 13 is missing. ...