Brian Clegg's Blog, page 144

It's out!It has rather crept out in dribs and drabs - but today is the official publication date of my new book, The Universe Inside You.

We start with looking at your body in the mirror. Usually you might think 'I need to lose a few pounds.' But that's not the point. Really look. What you see in front of you is one of the most amazing things in the universe. I wanted to start from your body and use that to explore science, both the direct science of what is in there and everything that contributes to making that body you.

So we explore the brain - using optical illusions amongst a whole range of experiments, and all the unexpected science in your body, like the amazing zoo of bacteria - you have 10 times as many bacterial cells as human in there. But also we get a chance to see how the science of the universe impinges on your body. We see how light from the Andromeda galaxy 2.5 million light years away stimulates your eyes. Those photons of light have been on their way for 2.5 million years, long before humans existed. Or taking a rollercoaster ride we discover how we have many more than 5 senses, detecting things like acceleration and heat - and how our bodies experience the warps in space and time that Einstein showed were the cause of gravity. That's not just a body, it's a lab to explore the wonders of the universe.

I can't remember when I last enjoyed writing a book so much - I suppose in the end because it's hard not to be interested in your own body, but more so because of all that you discover along the way.

The book has an accompanying website which includes a range of experiments, some involving the brain, for the reader to try out. Do take a look at www.universeinsideyou.com and see what you think.

As I write this, but not for long, you can get the Kindle ebook for just 99p in the UK and $1.57 in the US.

If you would prefer a hardcopy you can click through to Amazon from here.

When I run business creativity training sessions the participants often come up with great product ideas, which I encourage them to go and do something with. I came up with an invention the other morning which I am giving to the world - feel free to go out and make your fortune with this.

After my stint at the Edinburgh Science Festival I was having breakfast at the hotel before heading off through the snow, rain and howling winds (come on, it was Scotland) to get to the train.

It was a good breakfast, though it did suffer from some of the food snobbery issues I have highlighted previously (they did allow me brown sauce, though). But here's the thing. The toast, as it almost always is in such circumstances, didn't live up to the rest of the meal.

They brought a basket of toast, which then sat on the table through the meal. The trouble is, you need to butter toast when it is piping hot. It's only then that the butter sinks invitingly into the bread. Leave it to cool for more than 30 seconds before buttering and it is ruined.

So here's the invention. A battery-powered table top toaster. I'm sure with modern batteries you could get enough oomph for one meal into a self-contained unit. And that way, the diner can just pop in a slice as and when they want it, getting the perfect toast at their table. Of course they'd sell elsewhere as well, but any decent restaurant serving breakfast would need one per table.

Anyone care to take up the challenge?

Yesterday morning I set off from Swindon station at silly-o-clock to head up to Edinburgh to take part in the excellent science festival. My venue was to be the splendidly named Scottish Storytelling Centre, and my topic Build Your Own Time Machine.

I'll admit it was a long journey, but one I would much rather do by train than any other way - I got loads of work done on the journey, and everything ran smoothly (we even arrived early), though I was a little confused by the new Kings Cross.

After a spot of recuperation at the splendid Hotel du Vin (accommodation provided by the festival) - even if I was slightly unnerved to be put up in a former asylum - I headed off for the venue.

I think it's fair to say it was a brilliant talk. That sounds even more big headed than you might expect from me, but what I mean is it was a capacity crowd, they were a wonderful audience and the Q&A at the end was one of the best I've ever had, with great questions, some decidedly insightful ones coming from children.

We finished off with a book signing, where there were more great questions, but just one sad problem. The bookshop had ordered the wrong book. It was one of mine, but not Build Your Own Time Machine. This was really depressing as I think I would have sold a good number. As it was, I had taken one copy of the book with me to wave around on stage and I had three people fighting over who got it.

I ought to stress this wasn't down to the event manager, who was charming and very helpful. But it was just so sad and I felt embarrassed and kept apologising to people.

Despite that, it certainly wouldn't put me off coming back to Edinburgh Science Festival - I had a great time, and I hope they invite me again.

Photo to follow - I can't seem to upload it using Blogger on the iPad.

I'm currently reading the popular-despite-not-being-released-in-the-UK-yet Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer (any relation to the great Tom? We ought to know).

As someone who has helped people with creativity for over 15 years it is really interesting to see the approaches that have been pragmatically adopted for so long get some scientific basis with brain studies to support what those practising in the field have known for a long time.

However, Mr Lehrer does make one big error (admittedly following an academic who did the same thing). He isn't very impressed with Alex Osborn's method of brainstorming as a way of generating ideas. But the thing he totally misses, as so many do, is that Alex Osborn didn't devise brainstorming as a method for coming up with new ideas. It was simply a way of collecting ideas that ensured they weren't evaluated too soon and shot down before they could be thought about a little more and developed.

What Osborn always intended, but so many forget, is that the intention was for people to use an idea generating technique - a totally separate process - to come up with the idea, and then make use of brainstorming to collect these ideas. Without this generation component, brainstorming is pretty useless. But then driving a car doesn't work too well if you don't put petrol in it - and that's the exact equivalent of what Lehrer is proposing.

If you want to get a better idea of how brainstorming should really be used, do feel free to avail yourself of my free ebook, Instant Brainstorming where I try to put the record straight.

I'm breaking my usual absence of posts at the weekend to comment on the Amazon Kindle spring sale. They have a range of new books on sale at ridiculously cheap prices. I'm most interest because my latest book (which hasn't been mentioned here because it technically doesn't come out until 5 April, though it has been spotted in Waterstones) The Universe Inside You is one of these books, just 99p in the UK and $1.57 in the US.

Some have questioned whether it makes good business sense to sell a book that costs £12.99 (admittedly often quite heavily discounted from this) for just 99p in ebook form. I think as long as it is a limited duration offer, as this is, it makes a very good way of drawing a new book to people's attention. After all, for 99p it is surely worth taking a punt - and with awareness enhanced, it will hopefully then be more obvious as a print book.

The process started yesterday and so far it seems to be going pretty well. At the time of writing, The Universe Inside You is the #54 bestselling paid Kindle book in the UK, second only to The Selfish Gene (also currently 99p) in science.

I'll be posting some more detail about The Universe Inside You in a few days time... for the moment, it is an interesting reflection of the benefits ebooks bring. You can't do this sort of promotional pricing on real books, but ebooks give the flexibility to use a short-term discount to draw attention to both the electronic and paper versions.

See, we have culture in SwindonYesterday I had to hang around for about an hour on the outskirts of Swindon. I know you are thinking that sounds a bit like some sort of 'outer circle of hell' joke, but you are cruel, and indulging in a malicious stereotype. Swindon is really quite nice. There wasn't time to go anywhere with a nice little coffee shop or even Starbucks, so I popped into the nearby Holiday Inn for a quite acceptable if rather expensive cappuccino.

Out came the iPad (in fact I am writing this blog on it in the Holiday Inn coffee shop right now, yesterday, if you'll pardon the time mangling). When I know I'm going to have time to kill I always take my iPad with me and that does everything I need. In fact, thanks to the ubiquitousness of free Wi-fi I don't even bother to download anything as I know all my latest work will be there on Dropbox ready to access.

So I hit the Wi-fi button and up pops 'Holiday Inn Swindon Wi-fi' as you would expect. I click on 'Lounge Access'. (Does this make me a lounge lizard? Who remember the Larry game?) And I'm told it will cost me £5 for an hour. What? I can get free Wi-fi in Starbucks. I can get free Wi-fi in my local independent coffee shop. I get it free in pretty well every hotel I've stayed in for the last two years. But Holiday Inn want to charge me £5 for an hour. Giving free Wi-fi is a no-brainer.  It doesn't usually cost the business much on top of their Internet connection and it has become an expected essential. Charging for it is a bit like charging for a chair.

It's not even as if the coffee was particularly cheap. As I have said previously, I'm prepared to pay a premium for a nice place to sit. But I expect it to have the basic amenities. A chair, a table, access to a toilet, heating and light where necessary. And Wi-fi. I really don't think it's too much to ask.

(In case anyone is worried for my efficient use of time, I still had plenty to do offline, what with writing this post and reading an ebook I had already downloaded for research. But it's the principle of the thing.)

Image from Wikipedia

A Lord Spiritual, not in the HouseI am not an atheist or a rabid religion basher like our good friend Dr Dawkins. In fact, like Martin Rees I am very fond of the Church of England. But I am afraid I wholeheartedly disagree with the idea, apparently supported by all the main political parties, that the reformed House of Lords should retain a built-in set of bishops.

The main argument seem to be that there have always been 'Lords Spiritual', ever since the House of Lords was founded over 700 years ago. So what? Until it was banned there had always been dog fighting and bear baiting. Tradition is only a useful argument when it has some bearing on morale or makes a good profit, which hardly seems to be the case here.

It's not that I think bishops should be excluded from the House. I'd be happy to see them there. I just don't think they should have reserved places, they should be elected (or whatever the mechanism) like everyone else. If they are to stay, I think we should have lots of other places prescribed for specific occupations. Seriously - I would be very happy to take one of the places allocated to science writers. But if we don't get a set of reserved slots (and there are more of us than there are bishops) I don't see why they should.

Image from Wikipedia

On Sunday I kindly offered to attempt to make my children's bookings for Radio 1's Hackney Weekend. It was an experience all too familiar to anyone who has attempted to make an online booking for a ticket for a major festival.

To begin with, the site simply crashed with the sheer weight of people trying to get on it, producing error messages that suggest it didn't like your IP address, but I think were simply just its way of saying 'I can't cope!'

For the next hour, every attempt put you through to a holding page that said the booking page was too busy. What was mildly fascinating about this (you take fascination where you can when you are spending an hour repeatedly clicking the refresh button) was that the design of the screen seemed to change several times. I'm not just referring to the times when it only half-loaded and you got a text version, but even when you got the whole thing there seemed to be at least three different versions of it.

Then - joy, oh, joy, the buying screen came up - only to time out before all the information could be input.

For the next 20 minutes elusive sightings of the buying screen would disappear with dashed hopes, especially when over-enthusiastic clicking meant that the refresh button was clicked when the buying screen was on its way, returning me to the holding screen.

But finally, finally, I did manage to get them both a ticket. One and a half hours of mind-numbing tedium. Were they grateful? That's another story.

What I was struck by, though, was the sheer awfulness of a website for this sort of task. If you were designing a real computer system to deal with this, an entry module would hand out queue numbers (behind the scenes) - you'd go into a queue. While you were waiting you would gradually bubble up the queue and your position could be shown on screen. When you reached the top of the queue you could join the however many people the buying screen could cope with and have (say) 5 minutes to complete your transaction. It would be painless, there would be no fiddling about and crashing as 50,000 people tried to access the same web page simultaneously.

In the real computing world this should be relatively easy. Booking systems are not exactly a new idea for computing. Is it really beyond the wit of web programmers to embed some sort of queueing system into a web database? A lot of brownie points would go to the people who sort this out.

Political parties are anything but scientific (and let's face it, many politicians are totally ignorant about science). In one way, at least, it's rather good that they are so scientifically naive. If they weren't they could be even more devious.

I'm reflecting on some remarkable information in an equally remarkable book, Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind (take a look at my enthusiastic review of it). In one of those lovely bits of research that psychologists delight in doing, a group at Princeton discovered that when people were shown pairs of photos of candidates for various political roles (the participants did not know the people, or what party they stood for) and were asked to assess which was the more competent of the two, around two thirds of the time they picked the person who actually won the political contest.

It wasn't that they were always picking the most attractive person - snap judgements of attractiveness did not predict victory so well. They were picking the person who looked most likely to do a good job. And the amazing thing is that they could do this in one tenth of a second.

That's it. Forget all your campaigning and policies and goodness knows what. Pick the more competent looking candidate, get their image widely seen, and you're there (two thirds of the time). I can only assume from the look of many of our politicians that they are not currently chosen this way. But how long will it be...?

The only writer's block I haveI saw a lovely quote a couple of days ago (thanks to Lynn Price of Behler Publishing). It was along the lines of 'Writer's block - when even your imaginary friends won't talk to you.' It's partly such a clever line, but also, for me, emphasizes the fictional nature of writer's block. You can always write - not necessarily at your best, but that's what editing is for.

However, the reason I brought it up here was a completely different reason. A few weeks ago we went to see the comedian Chris Addison (the one behind the desk in the Direct Line adverts for UK readers). I'd never been to an evening of pure standup, so wondered if it could hold up for a whole show (after all, the likes of 'Live at the Apollo' are heavily edited so you only see the best bits). In fact it could, and he was great.

Addison seemed particularly lucky with his audience. He asked the audience a couple of questions and hit rich seams both times. On one of these occasions he asked if anyone had lied to their children. The story that emerged, about an imaginary friend, is just wonderful and worth repeating.

The woman who answered said that one of her children had an imaginary friend, and his younger sister was upset because she too wanted an imaginary friend, but hadn't got one. The mother switched into 'lie' mode and said 'That's not a problem, darling. I'm going to give you an imaginary friend.' And she put out her hands and picked up a chunk of air and passed it to the little girl.

She had expected a postive reaction. But the girl stared at the space in front of her and burst into tears. 'What's the matter?' asked the mother.

The girl managed to speak through her sobs. 'But I didn't wan't a parrot!' she said.

You really couldn't make it up.