Dan McNeil's Blog

This morning, I was at the dentist. Whilst in the chair, with my mouth numb, and one woman scraping at my teeth whilst another held a small hoover in my mouth I had some time to think. And I started to think about mirrors. Today I had a filling in one of my upper right molars. In order to see what she was doing, the dentist had to hold one of those little mirrors on a stick in my mouth and looking in that to see where she was poking. We tend to take looking in mirrors for granted. Doing up a tie or buttoning up a shirt in a mirror is normal( * ). If we have a bit of food around our mouth and look in the mirror, it's obvious what we need to do with our hands to achieve what we want, taking into account that we're looking at a reflection. But not all animals can do that. There've been several experiments over the years which attempt to ascertain whether certain animals realise that seeing something in a mirror puts everything the other way around. The experiment, in its simpl...

I stay in a lot of hotels. Well, more specifically, I stay in the same few hotels quite often. It's an artefact of my job, and I don't mind it as much as sometimes I may protest. Until recently, whenever business brought me to Manchester, I would stay in the Palace Hotel in the centre of Manchester. It's a lovely, big imposing hotel with an enormous lobby which gives a great impression. My first stay at The Palace was great. The time before last I was in a room which had a great view of the trains going in and out of Oxford Road station. So great a view, that I could see which newspaper the commuters were reading as they went past on the morning trains. And freight trains can be noisy things... My last stay at The Palace wasn't particularly nice. A fire alarm going off just after I'd got into bed, and then a horrible bout of food poisoning overnight didn't give me confidence in the hotel restaurant, so I decided not to stay there again. So I'm staying in a d...

About a year ago, almost to the day, I wrote an entry saying how much I loved Brian Cox's book. A year later I return to the subject of science. Well I say "science" - but what I'm actually writing about today are the articles which appear in The Metro and pretend to be science. Every Friday, The Metro has a science column. It's a double-page affair with lots of graphics and lots of snappy little paragraphs talking about science. All good. Except for the fact that it's mostly gibberish. I love science, and I love popular science. It's possible (but admittedly hard) to take the complexity out of science but maintain both the interest and the integrity of the writing. The Metro certainly manages to remove the complexity, but also seems to disregard any respect for scientific truth in the process. Almost every Friday I feel the need to take a red pen to the science articles and correct them, but I've got better things to do with my life (*). Unfort...

Recently, I've not taken as many flights as I did in previous jobs. It means that when I do take a plane anywhere, it's less routine and I actually think about it more. There was a time - when I was flying back and forth to Stockholm on a stupidly regular basis - that I could literally have found my way through the appropriate terminal buildings at both ends blindfolded had I been so challenged. I noticed today that I'm really quite a grumpy traveller. Sitting next to me on the plane was a woman who had put her handbag into the overhead locker, and another passenger managed to knock her bag out and onto the floor and she smiled and said "that's OK, don't worry about it". Had it been my handbag, I would've been furious. Metaphorically speaking, of course - given that I don't tend to travel with a handbag. Today I chose a seat in the emergency exit aisle. It means that in the event of an emergency, you have to remove the door and "be able ...

The other day, I was on a train home. Opposite sat a woman who seemed to be simlutaneously trying to break every rule of sitting on a train. She was eating smelly food, listening to loud music and had her feet on the seats. If only she'd had an open container of alcohol, she'd have had a full house. Something about her annoyed me - it wasn't the smell of the food, nor the music - it was the container in which she had her pile of fried chicken. Written on the edge of the lid along one of the flaps were the words "Thank you - please call again". Such ridiculous phrases do annoy me. Let's presume for a minute that I had bought a huge box of greasy fried chicken and was shovelling it into my mouth. I look down at the box and see the words "Thank you - please call again". Maybe I wasn't planning on going back to that particular chicken vendor, but seeing those words may just make me think "actually, that's very kind of them to say th...

You know how office Christmas parties are usually dull affairs. Everyone makes polite conversation over a glass of wine and then heads off home early. The only thing which can liven up a Christmas party is if someone - maybe someone who's had a bit more to drink than they are use to, perhaps - says or does something memorable. Welcome to my Christmas party 2010... I've been in my "new" job since July. I haven't really discussed my private life with many of my colleagues. It's not that I hide anything from them - I just haven't gone out of my way to make them aware of my domestic arrangements. There's been a lot of use of phrases such as "my other half" and "my partner" bandied around when it comes to discussing weekend plans and holidays... Anyway, I wasn't going to drink at yesterday's Christmas party. I was due to head out to my partner's parents place in the evening (I'm doing it again...) and so the plan w...

Roof Gardening How we turned out back garden from this.. . ... to this... The basics Roof gardening has challenges over and above gardening on the ground. Not only does everything have to be grown in containers, but everything needs to stand on the roof of a building – and don’t forget that the roof of the building may be the floor of your garden but it’s also the ceiling of the people below. We are lucky enough to have some outdoor space with our flat in London, and we’ve spent the past few years turning a couple of empty, flat terraces into lush green gardens. Our front garden is a more traditional roof garden – Mediterranean trees in pots against the wall and a screen of bamboo to shelter delicate plants from the worst of the wind. This garden was already planted to some degree when we moved in, and our work has been to add to what was already there. The back garden was, as you can see from the photo above, literally an empty concret...