Brian Clegg's Blog, page 159

Ideas and books

I love being an author. There's very little about it (apart from writing proposals) that I don't enjoy. And one of my favourite things is talking to people about writing, science and (yes, sorry) my books. I'm happy to discuss practically anything. But there's one subject of conversation that comes up all too regularly that does make me wince just the tiniest bit. It goes something like this:

Them: 'You write books, don't you?'
Me: (Slightly embarrassed, but pleased): 'Yes.'
Them: 'I know what your next book should be about.'
Me: 'Well, actually...'
Them (Getting warmed up): 'I've got this great idea for a book, you see. You should write a book for children, make it a story, but put science in it, and...'

You get the picture. If I'm really lucky they will then say something like 'But if you use my idea, I expect my cut of the royalties!' Hmm.

The truth of the matter is that having ideas for books is really not a problem - at least I don't find it to be. I have a list of book ideas as long as your arm, tucked away on OneNote on my computer. I probably add to it about once a week. But the fact is, most of them will not get turned into books. If I am looking for a topic, on second examination, in the cold light of day, many of them will be so-so at best. Those that still do seem good will need a considerable amount of working over, then I have to sell them to a publisher (sadly, they don't leap on every idea I come up with as if it were manna from heaven), and there's also the teeny matter of writing the book.

I am quite happy with my ideas (and those of publishers, who sometimes suggest a cracker). If someone has a great idea for a book, why not write it themselves? By the time they've worked at it a couple of months, perhaps they will revise their thoughts on it. Or perhaps they will write a great book.

It's not that I don't appreciate the thought. But, really, getting great ideas is by far the easiest part of being an author. So I'm happy to hear an idea, but I'm pretty unlikely to do anything about it.

P.S. Apparently Katy Price defends the fact that she doesn't write 'her' books by saying 'But I did have some of the ideas for them!' Nuff said.

Farewell incandescent light bulb, we shall miss you

As the 60 watt bulb follows its 100 watt cousin into European illegality it's time to say a fond farewell to a light bulb that has kept our houses lit for over120 years. Admittedly the filament went from being carbon to tungsten, but this was a matter of tweaking and subtlety, not a huge change in the design.

If you ask the famous man in the street (that one, standing on the corner) who invented the electric light bulb, he would probably say Thomas Edison, as would many pub quizmasters. But they would be wrong. It's certainly true that in 1879 Edison produced an electric light bulb after much fiddling around with different filaments. And he did claim to be first on the scene, but English scientist Sir Joseph William Swan had demonstrated a bulb, like Edison's based on a carbon filament, nearly eight months earlier.

Swan, much less of a businessman, hadn't bothered with the level of patent applications that Edison had. Nor had he the same cutthroat commercial sense. Edison's reaction to the news of Swan's invention was to launch a patent infringement prosecution.

Patent law often seems to favor the commercially strong rather than the most original thinker, but in this case Swan's earlier invention was recognized by the court and Edison failed. As part of the court settlement, Edison was obliged to recognize Swan's independent and earlier invention and to set up a joint company, the Edison and Swan United Electric Light Company, to exploit the incandescent bulb.

Rumbunctious beginnings, then for the humble incandescent light bulb. But still an invention who passing we can mark with a certain sadness.


Picture from Wikipedia

Light Reading

Diamond Light Source in all its gloryIt's not surprising that as a writer who specializes in science, I'm all in favour of the intersection of science and words. This can mean the sort of non-fiction writing I do, but equally could be science fiction or the rather intriguing category lablit - fiction with a science context, but not science fiction. (Take a look at the Lablit website for a clearer idea what it's about.)

If you ever fancied writing either S.F. or lablit, there's a new competition called Light Reading that's just up your street. It's run by the Diamond Light Source synchrotron people, one of the UK's top physics research centres and has cash prizes from £500 downwards. What's not to love? Entries and more details at the competition website. Closing date for entries is 30 November.

If you aren't familiar with Diamond, this powerful facility generates incredibly bright light from infra-red to X-rays and is used by thousands of scientists every year to study all kinds of materials, from artificial hips and samples of the Mary Rose to virus proteins and potential new fuel sources.

Gerd Materlik, Diamond's Chief Executive, comments 'The first experiments took place here at Diamond in 2007 so we are still a relatively new science facility.  Light Reading is a great way for us to highlight what Diamond is all about to a more general audience and we hope to get entries from both inside and outside the science community.  Aspiring or experienced fiction writers are warmly invited to submit a story.  Diamond is a really fascinating place and I'm sure the competition will lead to some brilliant stories, which I'm really looking forward to reading.'

Why is it so gut-wrenching?

The game mentioned.
I still have it.I was just listening to a piece on the radio about a show that is being put together to commemorate 9/11 in the US. Listeners have been asked to select a piece of music they feel works best for such memories. By far and away the most popular choice is Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.

I agree absolutely, but can anyone explain why this piece is so visceral? How do a few notes, strung together in a particular way, manage to cut through the emotions so surgically? I know music always influences the emotions - there are plenty of songs that bring a smile to the face, for example. But Adagio for Strings (and for me, even more so Barber's vocal adaptation, the Agnus Dei) is unequalled in its ability to manipulate.

A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) one of the things I used to do to bring in the pennies was review computer games. It was as the backing track to the opening sequence of a game that I first came across this piece (back then it wasn't played on the radio anywhere near so often). The backstory of the game involved the evacuation of a planet, and as the screen showed the ship departing from a dying world, the backing track of Barber's Agnus Dei worked magnificently.

I don't know if anyone has researched it, but I'd be fascinated to know why this particular piece is so powerful.

So go on. Have a wallow:

Science joke

This is an excellent joke to spot scientists in an audience. They are the ones who laugh.

A dietician, a geneticist and a physicist are arguing over how to get a horse that's good at winning races.

'It's easy,' says the dietician. 'You just feed it a carefully balanced and monitored diet.'

'No, no,' says the geneticist. 'It's all a matter of breeding for the best attributes for racing.'

'Hmm,' says the physicist. 'Let's assume the horse is a sphere...'

The only way is up (baby)... until it comes down

If there's one thing authors obsess about most it's sales figures for their books. This is often reflected in an addictive urge to check the Amazon sales rank - but that's only a substitute for the real thing. We want to know how many books are selling.

Publishers typically have a lot of information about sales, but rarely share it with the author in detail, except every six months or so in the royalty statement. But thanks to a service called Book Scan, the data is out there on a weekly basis for most (though admittedly not all) retail outlets. And we're not talking orders, which can always be returned, but hard sales through the till.

Amazingly Amazon now makes this available to authors with books published in the US. It's only paper books, not ebooks, but includes both Amazon and plenty of outlets. You can look back over 8 weeks data, broken down to the main selling books, a display that can either be uplifting or depressing, depending on the way the bars are going. The bar chart shown, by the way, is my sales for the last 8 weeks. You can either look on it that things are going rather well, or that they were rubbish 8 weeks ago. (The actual chart includes totals, and you can hover the mouse to see how many books are in each part of the bar.)

This is fascinating information - if you are published in the US and aren't on Amazon's Author Central service which provides this data, run don't walk to your computer.

Now I just have to wait to see if that slight fall was just a random variation or could be the start of a trend. Once more with the feeling. The only way is up...

There's another pile-up in aisle thirteen

Not the Cromwell Road Sainsbury's
I gather that the supermarket Sainsbury's is trialling shopping trolleys with built-in iPad docks in their Cromwell Road store in London. When I saw the headline, I assumed that there would be some funky Sainsbury's shopping app which meant you could set up a shopping list at home and it would then guide you around the store on the best route to get all the things you need. (Yes, please, Sainsbury's.) But no. Apparently the idea, sponsored by Sky, is that you can watch things like the BBC iPlayer, music videos or, no surprise, Sky's online sports facility.

To add to the fun, the dock is equipped with speakers so you can blast out your favourite tunes or catch all the dialogue in Doctor Who.

Are they serious? Okay, there are going to be lots of fun opportunities for collisions (apparently the trolleys are equipped with sensors on the front to warn you if you are about to collide with another trolley or a pile of tins of beans, something that you only ever see in the movies, sadly). But I'd be more concerned about the noise pollution. Do you really want to walk around a supermarket being blasted by a distorted version of Nero's ecstatic drum and bass in one ear (yes, I is down with the kidz), and a football commentary from the other side of the aisle? No-o-o-o-o!

For that matter I'm surprised Sainsbury's think it is a good thing. Supermarkets are designed to encourage you to spot things you didn't realize you wanted to buy. Huge effort is put into the layout of shops and the order in which you reach things. Bakeries are generally put at the back of the store, for instance, so the smell of fresh bread draws you in. But all this commerical wizardry would be wasted if your shoppers are trundling around zombie-like, watching a screen and missing all your nice displays.

So here's the deal, Sainsbury's. By all means give us a dock and a shopping app. But take away the speakers. Otherwise I'm off to Waitrose.

* Disclaimer - there are other supermarkets, and to be honest I rarely shop at Sainsburys these days, but it's the principle of the thing *

I'm prevaricating again

An author prevaricating recently
I know I've written about this before, but it's important. If there is one thing authors like to do, it's prevaricate. I've never yet met an author who didn't admit to the fact that the moment they sat down to write, they felt a strong urge to do something else. Anything else. Even the dishwasher or the hoovering. Or hoovering the dishwasher.

Some authors have taken this to a fine art. Douglas Adams famously had to be forced to write by locking him in a hotel room until he came up with the goods. But pretty well all of us do it.

The silly thing is that once you get going, it's hard to stop. Once you are writing, you want to keep at it. I know this. It should mean that I want to get in there and start writing right now. But I don't. (Okay, I am writing this, but anything other than the book counts as prevarication.)

At the moment I'm at the worst possible point in the cycle. I'm just about to take the plunge into a new book. I'm looking at a word count of about 500 words (with chapter headings and a few outline contents) and I have to turn that into 80,000 words. It's daunting. Where to start? But I know that my old friend prevarication will be back every day as I get to the point when I've checked the bank account, done the emails, got up to date on Google reader and done pretty well anything else I can think of to prevent myself writing a book.

So here we go. I'm going in. Wish me luck. Hang on, though. I think the dishwasher needs emptying. I'll just get that done first...

No laughing matter?

If you are parent whose teens have a party, you may find amongst the bottles and cans a few objects that raise a nostalgic smile. Most people my age will have fond memories of the soda syphon. My grandmother gave me a splendid Edwardian looking one with a glass bottle and metal mesh around it, and these little cartridges of carbon dioxide used to be commonplace before the likes of Sodastream made them untrendy.

The chances are, though, that if you find these after a party, they aren't quite what they seem. If you happen to find a box you will discover that they are not CO2 cartridges, but intended for 'cream chargers' that are used to produce catering quantities of squirty cream. And the gas in the cylinder is not CO2 but N2O - nitrous oxide - commonly known as laughing gas. This is, it seems, the latest party and nightclub thrill.

The good news is that the gas is not illegal, and if used properly is less dangerous than many drugs. But it's not all good news.

The use of nitrous oxide for social entertainment goes back to the early days of the discovery of the gas. Although it soon became a useful anaesthetic, from very early days it was also a recreational drug, with records of it use going back to 1799. There was a time when laughing gas parties where popular, where groups of people would take turns to sniff the gas and to collapse on the floor from dizziness or in fits of giggles and unseemly laughter, an abandonment of propriety that must have seemed particularly thrilling in those often stuffy times.

This use seems to have primarily died out in the twentieth century, except amongst doctors, nurses and dentists, who have always been rumoured to misuse the stuff - but now it's back big time, thanks to these little cylinders, intended to get that cream a-foaming.

Is it a good thing? Probably not. There has been at least one recent death due to nitrous oxide inhilation. It's not that it's poisonous per se, but if you breathe too much of the stuff, you aren't breathing oxygen and you asphyxiate. It is apparently psychologically addictive - meaning addictive in the sense that theme park rides or cheeseburgers are addictive, as opposed to a chemical addiction. It's the experience that is addictive. And crucially a relatively small amount of the gas can render the user incapable or semi-conscious - not an ideal situation in a club, out on the street, or particularly if cars are involved.

There may also be longer term physical damage caused by use of the gas, as its mechanism of action isn't fully understood.

If you find laughing gas cylinders after a party, it's not a matter for panic. It's not illegal, and it's unlikely to produce as bad a result as over-consumption of alcohol. We tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to all drugs that aren't caffeine or alcohol (or if you've had a certain lifestyle, which I haven't, cannabis), but in the case of N2O, this is probably wrong. Nonetheless, it's another potential way to get into trouble, which as a parent is not something I can cheer about.

History re-written

It seems to be translations week so far.

A more eagle-eyed reader than I has pointed out that the German version of my Egghead Physics book has moved my birthplace from Rochdale (which is in der englischen Grafschaft Lancashire) to Rochester, which certainly isn't.

This is a teensy bit worrying, and suspiciously suggestive of some alternative universe theory of reality.

Could it be that in every country for which a book is translated, the author is a subtly different person with a different background? Could it be that in this alternative universe, I come from Rochester, which really is in Lancashire? The mind boggles.