Night sky fab tonight Look at Moon + Mars Line between the two right angle to ecliptic. LOOK lunar orbit is inclined at 5 deg to ecliptic!

Spring is sprung. Lots of lively frogs spawning in my Cambridge UK wildlife pond. And we are still eating home grown apples picked in October. WOW!

Great sky tonight: soaring panorama from east to west: Mars, nearly full Moon, Orion, Jupiter, Venus.

By the end of this month I will send to Springer an edited collection on Georges Lemaitre, papers from a conference April 2011 RAS-Series

Just signed contract Cambridge U Press for next book Remarkable Astronomers You do not want me to write about YOU - dead astronomers only!

I just delivered to Princeton U Press image files for my forthcoming book on origin of structure in the universe. That's it "in press" WOW

Writing a popular astronomy book: beware, every equation halves the market

Yes,I amthe publisher's editor who told Stephan Hawking that. It's in the Preface of the earlier editions of a Brief History of Time, but without mentioning me by name. When I saw the draft typescript I noted that there were some two dozen equations. About a year before he showed me the draft I had published The Accidental Universe by Paul Davies. This had disappointing sales and the feedback from Cambridge U Press sales dept was that the equations were intimidating.

Fast forward to now. There is a big news story in the UK that half the population cannot do math. They cannot turn a "25% discount" into pounds and pence, or work out a 15% deposit, or figure out 20% VAT. And calculating how many cans of paint you need to fix up your house is impossible. Nowonder governements canget away with borrowing billions and indeed trillions of pounds / euros / dollars

There is a good introduction to the dire state of numeracy education in the UK at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17224600