Today I was invited to attend the screening of the original Robocop movie, and then have a live chat with the audience about it. One of my more unusual public appearances perhaps! The invite came from science in the pub, who like to screen classic movies and then have an hour's discussion of the themes explored in each film with a designated expert. Our chat was also recorded by James O'Malley for the Pod Delusion - you can listen here. I think I mentioned scenes from the movie a few times so might help to see the film first!

While work activities have slowed down during the Christmas break I've taken the opportunity to wrap up the new eBook edition of my first popular science book Digital Biology and release it to the online stores. This is a new revised edition with a new preface and footnotes which bring the reader up to date with research since this book was first written ten years ago. I also adjusted the text here and there - for example I can no longer refer to "cream coloured computers" any more - the days of IBM PCs and their single colour scheme are long gone! It was a lot of fun revisiting this book again, and it made me realise how my writing style has matured over the years. It also made me realise just how much (and in some cases, how little) progress we have made in the research areas of digital biology in the last ten years.

You can find this new edition of Digital Biology online here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Digital-Biology- ebook/dp/B006RBGMUI

and here:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/digital-biology/id497529197?mt=11

A year after this new book was commissioned, and it is with the publisher, Oxford trade. I've had a lot of fun writing it - I was lucky enough to interview many pioneers of computer science, old and new. We've now decided the best title should be Digitized and we've decided on the cover, see below. There was quite some discussion about what message should be encoded in the QR code that forms part of the cover design. See what you think! The book will be published in March 2012. We plan to have a book launch and signing on March 26 in Waterstones, Gower St, London.

I'm quoted in another New Scientist article, this time about some interesting work performed by one of Boeing's research groups. It's a system that uses a combination of the Wifi and Bluetooth trace from your gadgets to plot where you've been, and then make predictions about where you will go next. Paul Marks calls it a "Pre-Social Network". But its timing - when privacy invasions are in the news every day - could have been better. The article is online here.

I like New Scientist because they quote fairly. For those who want to know exactly what I said to Paul when he asked for a quote, it was this:

This seems like a very interesting piece of work. It is likely that this kind of prediction would be very accurate - people tend to follow regular patterns of behaviour, even walking the same routes each day. There is clearly a valuable aspect to generic and anonymised predictions like these, for they would allow us to ensure that the necessary computer resources are in the right places at the right times - so everyone would always have a good wifi signal for example.

However there are clearly some major privacy issues. It does paint a slightly Orwellian picture: how would you feel if your future movements and even your future happenstance meetings were all predicted in advance by exploiting your previous patterns of movement? The police might love it as a way of predicting the movements of criminals (akin to Philip K Dick's "Minority Report"), and advertisers would love it as a way of tailoring adverts, but what if anyone could predict exactly where you will be and who you will be with? It's a stalker's dream!

Speaking personally, I am comfortable with the idea of the technology around me being optimised for my personal usage - if I walk through the park each day I'd be pleased to have wifi access optimised for my usage as I walk. I'm uncomfortable with the idea that my movements and social interactions could be predicted, and that prediction could be available to anyone. If it is anonymised so that specific places become "hotspots" for meeting people with specific interests this may be better; although I question the need for computer predictions to enable this.

But what do I know? It would not surprise me if Google+ or facebook has this feature by this time next year...

Every author likes to hear from their readers, especially when they express their own enthusiasm in the subject. Here's a recent message:

Hello, I am really enjoying your book on mathematics. I am attempting to teach myself math and my question may sound ridiculous, if it does, I apologize. I was reading where you said the irrational numbers are between the spaces of rational numbers. It is so beautiful and poetic, I wasn’t sure if you were being literal. I have a fascination of the space from 0 to 1, and this sentence began a new fascination. Thank you for any response.

I'm glad you enjoyed the book! Math can involve a lot of imagination, where we think about strange spaces that may only exist in the world of numbers. It's true there are an infinite number of irrational numbers that live in between the rational numbers - it's up to you whether you wish to think of them as "spaces" but I think it can help if you are a visual kind of person.

Thank you much for responding. I forgot to say that the book is not only delightful but beautiful.