I have been very lax recently about posting blogs and updates - sorry. My excuse is that I've been busy with my new book, a cultural history of cities to be published by Bloomsbury in the UK (more on that later), and reviewing. I've also discovered Twitter and would definitely recommend it - but with a warning: it is addictive! So come and say hello @PD_Smith !

One of the great new contacts I've made on Twitter is Dr Tim Jones (@physicus) who is currently on a career break studying for an MSc in Science Communication at Imperial College. He co-presents a show called Mission Impossible on Imperial College Radio and he invited me on to talk about Doomsday Men. You can stream the program here. (The interview is about 40 minutes into the show.)

As I say, there are lots of fascinating people to meet on Twitter - one of my favourite authors William Gibson is there, disguised as @GreatDismal, as well as many other great writers, like Clare Dudman, Fiona Mackenzie, and Thomas Levenson, author of Einstein in Berlin, bloggers like John Self, publishers and agents, such as my own, Peter Tallack.

To quote one of my other favourite authors, Nick Harkaway, Twitter is like a "giant pub". So order a drink and join the big conversation...

"The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow-creature, but a problem," says HG Wells's mad vivisector Dr Moreau, attempting to justify his grotesque animal experiments. In Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat, the philosopher and psychologist Rom Harré explores the history of scientists who have used plants and animals - the "living laboratory" - to test hypotheses and collect data. But Harré's original and thoughtful study is not explicitly about the ethics of animal experimentation. Instead, he wants to show how the instrumentarium of science is not restricted to beakers and Bunsen burners, but has always included organic apparatus, from Galvani's frog's legs twitching with electricity, to Mendel's pea plants, to thought experiments such as Schrödinger's cat, poised eternally (and inhumanely) between life and death. Indeed, the living laboratory is at the very heart of science, he argues: "animals and plants become devices we research with rather than something we research on".

Winter has arrived in Hampshire.
I haven't seen this much snow since I lived in Munich...

 "At 7.30 on the evening of April 24, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pushed a button on his desk in Washington, DC, sending a telegraphic signal to New York where it set off an alarm bell in the engine room of a skyscraper and set in motion four mighty Corliss-type engines and dynamos. In an instant, some 80,000 incandescent bulbs flashed on, illuminating for the first time the world’s tallest skyscraper – the Woolworth Building. Thousands of spectators had gathered in City Hall Park and along lower Broadway to witness the dazzling electrical spectacle that marked the opening of this fifty-five-storey addition to New York’s skyline. On the New Jersey shore, people caught their breath as the tower appeared, shimmering against the night sky, a gleaming beacon of modernity visible from ships a hundred miles away. As the 792-foot tall skyscraper was bathed in electric light, the news was being transmitted from its pinnacle by Marconi wireless to a receiver on the Eiffel Tower. From there it was beamed around the world. This modern media event was, as one commentator said, 'the premier publicity stunt of this or any other day'. It was a fitting opening for what would become the most famous office building in the world."

Read the rest here.

Are any of you on Twitter?

I've just joined, so if you are drop me a line...

http://twitter.com/PD_Smith