I wish podcasting was my only job - I have more fun doing that than I have doing absolutely anything else. But my job is that I'm a writer.

The only thing that's a challenge for me is not working. I get depressed when I'm not in motion.

If you are making money writing, you are doing great. If you can support yourself writing, you are a success. I don't care if you're writing textbooks or Pulitzer Prize-winning articles for weighty publications of world renown: If you're writing and it's paying the bills, consider yourself a successful writer.

Oh, yeah, I did the online dating thing. I did Nerve, I did Match. On Nerve there was this one guy who, when I asked him what he did for a living, said he 'used to be in a band.' I was like, 'That is not an occupation.'

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.

One of the problems we've had is that the ICT curriculum in the past has been written for a subject that is changing all the time. I think that what we should have is computer science in the future - and how it fits in to the curriculum is something we need to be talking to scientists, to experts in coding and to young people about.

So my degree was in political science, which I think was - the closest I could come to marketing is politics.

Sense About Science is much more than an innocent fact-checking service. It is a spin-off of a bizarre political network that began life as the ultra-left Revolutionary Communist Party and switched over to extreme corporate libertarianism when it launched 'Living Marxism' magazine in the late eighties.