In search of mad scientists, and enjoying schools

I'm delighted to say that my latest book Armageddon Science is now available in the UK as well as the US. I won't repeat all the details - I gave the bumf about it here, and I cover it here on my website, but you can now rush along to Amazon.co.uk and buy a copy in the UK, if you feel so inclined. To make matters even more thrilling (can they be more thrilling, I here you ask?), if you click on the 'n new' under 'More buying choices' on the right of the Amazon page, you can buy a signed copy. What's not to love? This is the Christmas present that says you mean more to me than the apocalypse.

As there is only so much self-promotion I can do without feeling faintly queasy, I ought also to say what a great time I had at Bradon Forest School yesterday. Situated in Purton, a village outside Swindon, this secondary school had a special day yesterday where all their Year 7s had four writing-oriented workshops through the day. There was me on non-fiction writing and books, plus a poet, a writer and artist and an ex-stand up comedian who now writes freelance for magazines.

It's great talking to this age because they are old enough to get the ideas, but haven't been in secondary school long enough to become cynical. They were great audiences (each of us gave the session four times to groups of around 55). My only worry is that I was doing a fairly unstructured session - I had notes on bits I wanted to put in it, but I let the structure flow. This is fine for a single workshop, but by the time you are doing your fourth I was thinking 'Oh, no, have I already talked to them about this, or was it the previous group?' So apologies if I repeated myself...

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Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

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

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope

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