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I've been a fan of Arthurian legend for as long as I remember. It's one of my favourite stories. I've read and seen countless versions over the last thirty or forty years.

But I don't think I've ever come across a version as terrible as the BBC's new series Merlin which started last night. It was so bad that I'm shuddering as I think about it now. I have two major problems with it.

The first is that it's made in the same way as Robin the Hoodie - by which I mean that the BBC have managed to make another historical drama with absolutely no sense of history. The characters talk and act like they've just stepped out of the twenty-first century. Oh, there's some small effort to create sets and costumes that look historical in some vaguely Medieval fashion, but something about it makes it all completely unconvincing.

Secondly, and to my mind far more disappointingly, they've changed the story so much that it is only recognisable because of the characters' names. Now, of course I realise that the story is only a legend and that there is no "true version" to measure it against, but there are certain key points that a retelling needs to include and Merlin seems determined to remove them all. Here are a few of the obvious ones that I noticed.

• Uther Pendragon is king of Camelot. In any versions of the story that mention Camelot, it is created by Arthur once he has become king.
• Arthur is living with Uther. Arthur is, of course, Uther's son. But Uther tricked Arthur's mother, Igraine, into sleeping with him (with Merlin's help) and on the day Arthur was born, Merlin took him to live with Sir Ector and his son Kay. Arthur didn't find out who his father was until he became king.
• As suggested by the previous point, Merlin is far older than Arthur. He's older than Uther. But this programme has Merlin and Arthur as boys together. In fact Merlin seems younger than Arthur.
• Merlin's teacher was called Blaise, not Gaius.
• They have Guinevere as a servant. She's the daughter of King Leodegrance, not a servant. Oh, and she seems to be flirting with Merlin. Which is just wrong.
• There is no talking dragon in Arthurian legend. Geoffrey of Monmouth has a story about two dragon's fighting in a lake which Merlin finds when he is a young boy. But they don't talk and he doesn't learn anything from them.

There are probably more differences (I fully expect Morgana to do something completely out of character at some point - we don't know yet if she's still Arthur's half-sister) but those are the worst offenders that I noticed whilst watching it.

It's so different from the usual version of the story that it seems completely pointless to link it with the Arthurian story at all. If they just changed the names then it could be the story of any young wizard coming to terms with his powers. It would still be badly-written, derivative rubbish, but at least it wouldn't offend the sensibilities of people who know the story.

Actually, I think that's what I object to the most. If this is at all successful, then there will be a generation of children for whom this will be the first version of the story that they encounter. And for them it will become the definitive version. Which is a real shame when they could be getting far better versions of the story from Malory, TH White or even John Boorman.

I recently read Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur. That was a great retelling of the story. It introduced many interesting new ideas whilst staying true to the spirit of the legend. If the BBC wanted to make an Arthurian drama, then they should have adapted that. It would have been far better than the rubbish we've been given.

Tim has been talking about the Daily Mail's comment moderation policy recently. It seems that any comment which fails to endorse the Mail's editorial policy is very unlikely to be published on their site.

So here's an experiment.

On their web site today (I assume it's in the paper too, but I haven't looked), they are running a story with the headline "My, hasn't she grown! Dakota Fanning passes the awkward phase with flying colours". You'll probably remember Dakota Fanning from things like Taken and Charlotte's Web. Well, Dakota was a young girl when she starred in those productions and, as young girls have a habit of doing, she has grown into a teenager. And that's what the Daily Mail story is all about. Dakota Fanning now is 14. One quote will suffice to demonstrate the tone that the paper has taken:

At the premiere for her controversial new film Hounddog, the 14-year-old unveiled a mature new look showing she's well on her way to being all grown up.

The story is illustrated with pictures of her looking "all grown up".

The Daily Mail is, as I'm sure I don't have to remind you, one of the UK newspapers which is most likely to run stories about the growing dangers of paedophilia in our society. Of course I don't condone paedophilia in any form. But I do find it somewhat ironic that a paper like the Mail finds it acceptable to print a story like this which exists purely to draw attention to the physical changes that a teenage girl is going through.

So, eventually, here's the experiment.

I've just submitted the comment below to the Mail site. Let's see if it gets published.

It's hard to believe that a story this is being run in a newspaper that frequently runs stories on the horrors of paedophilia. Do you not see a potential issue here?

I'm betting that it won't ever see the light of day. But I'd love to be proved wrong on this.

It's very unlikely that you haven't heard of Chrome, the browser that Google launched last week. If you're running Windows then you may have even tried it out.

Those of you (and I assume it's most of you) who follow tech news will also know that there was some confusion over Chrome's licence agreement during the week. On Wednesday it was noticed that the agreement (which everyone is bound by when using the software) claimed that Google had full rights to do whatever it wanted with any data that you submitted through the browser. Uproar ensued for a few hours until Google realised its mistake, apologised and removed the offending clause. By Thursday lunchtime everything was fine again.

But not in the world of the Daily Mail. For some reason they decided to run the story about Chrome's licence today. Why they didn't run it on Thursday or Friday when the story was still fresh, I don't know, but it's there on their web site today. Of course as the confusion over the licence has all been resolved, they mention that in the fourth and fifth paragraphs.

Google's 'End User License Agreement' (EULA) attracted so many complaints in a 24-hour period that it was forced to edit the offending clause.

It now states that users 'retain copyright and any other rights' that they hold on material posted or submitted online.

But it seems that isn't clear enough for Mail readers, some of whom have left comments on the story demonstrating that they obviously haven't managed to get that far into the story. Maybe they only read the headline before becoming so insensed that they had to post a comment. Here are some examples:

Sounds like an excellent reason to steer well clear of it - Fred James, Worcester, UK

Thank you Daily Mail.You have just stopped me from downloading this new Browser. - william

I'm uninstalling... - Phillie L Hall, Abu Dhabi

All in all it seems that these particular Mail readers fail at basic comprehension.

Update: I've just noticed that at the top of their story, the Mail describe this problematic clause as a "hidden" clause. In what way was it hidden? It was just part of the licence agreement. It was only hidden in the same way that all clauses of all licences are hidden - because no-one ever reads them.

Richard Dawkins' new documentary series, The Genius of Charles Darwin, begins on Channel 4 this evening. He has therefore been doing a round of publicity interviews and the results have been appearing in the press over the weekend. It's interesting to see how different papers treat it.

The Times ran a pretty straight article about Dawkins and his work (actually they ran another piece a couple of weeks ago).

The Guardian gave the article to Charlie Brooker. Brooker has no time for religion in any form so his piece is as funny and unapologetic as you would hope.

The Mirror's piece is quite strange. The writer takes the approach that actually, the evidence for evolution isn't quite as strong as Dawkins claims and that an intelligent person wouldn't take a firm position in the discussion. The Mirror writer is, it would appear, a fool.

But the strangest approach comes from the Daily Mail and the Telegraph. Both of these papers have found a way to spin the story so that it backs up their xenophobic agenda. They do this by picking up on a remark from Dawkins where he says that many muslims have creationist beliefs and that it is therefore muslim families who are largely responsible for the increase of creationism that we are seeing in the UK. Now, no-one will deny that there are a large number of creationist muslims. Or that their children are being indoctrinated into believing that evolution by natural selection is "just a theory". But I strongly suspect that this is rather missing the point of the documentary which, from what I understand having not seen it yet, is to explain the power of Darwin's theory.

But if we're going to get into the discussion of who is behind the current growth in creationism, it looks to me like the Mail and the Telegraph are ignoring some convenient facts. There are also a growing number of christians who are telling their children that evolution is unproven and Genesis is literally true. Of course that doesn't sit well with the papers' agenda. They want to promote the idea that it's the evil foreigners who are destroying our society. Their argument is as weak as it ever is, but it seems that an argument doesn't need to be particularly logically coherent in order to convince the readers of either paper.

Oh, and I don't recommend reading the comments on either of those stories. Discussions of creationism and evolution always seem to attract the hard of understanding and it seems that the Mail and Telegraph readership has more than its fair share of people like that.

Ooh, ooh. ooh. Much excitement. Dr Horrible is coming. This is going to be fabulous.

Update: Well, it might be fabulous. I can't be sure. It seems that you can only view it from within the USA. Bugger.

I like a bit of controversy in my RSS feeds. I subscribe to feeds from the Daily Mail and the Sun - papers that are guaranteed to get my blood boiling. An occasional increase in blood pressure can be most invigorating.

But I've just removed an RSS feed from my list of subscriptions because there was a distinct danger that it was going to give me a heart attack. I've been reading Biased BBC for about a year (I'm pretty sure that it was Martin who first pointed it out to me).

The premise of the site is pretty uncontentious. They say that the BBC is staffed exclusively by left-leaning Londoners and that the opinions in its output don't reflect the views of the general population of the country. Having worked at the BBC a couple of times, I have to agree that there is a large number of people working there with left of centre political views. However, I've only ever worked in the IT group so I can't say whether the same applies to the editorial groups.

And whilst anyone can point to occasional lapses in editorial balance by any media outlet, accusations of an organised attempt to brainwash the country fall far wide of the mark. I pretty sure that most of the contributors to Biased BBC would continue accuse the BBC of bias unless it was broadcasting exactly their opinion all the time. They seem to be confusing "bias" with "failure to agree with me completely".

But anyway, I found it an interesting read. Occasionally they'd point out some real example of BBC bias. More often it was an amusing way to read about a completely different view of the world.

All that changed a few months ago when Biased BBC introduced a new contributor called David Vance. Vance doesn't see the BBC as a generally reasonable organisation which exhibits occasional lapses of judgement. He sees it as a tool of the devil and find examples of left wing (oh, and pro-islamic) bias in everything that the BBC broadcasts. He is posting several entries a day, each one a foaming-at-the-mouth rant about the BBC. It's boring and depressing.

So that's why I've decided to stop reading the site. It went beyond parody and just became a waste of time. The site takes comments, so I've been tempted to get involved in discussions there occasionally, but looking at the opinions held by most of the contributors there, it would be a waste of everyone's time. They aren't going to listen to reason. They are happy to sit there with the veins in their neck throbbing away bashing out conclusive proof that everyone in the BBC is a potential terrorist who wants to implement shariah law in the UK.

It used to be good fun, but now it's just dull.

Can someone please let me know when it goes back to how it used to be?

Tomorrow is the thirtieth anniversary of the first broadcast of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This makes me feel more than a little old. I didn't listen to the first episode but, having heard about it from friends at school, I started listening from episode two.

The BBC web site has decided to commemorate this anniversary with a spectacularly bad piece of journalism entitled What on earth is 42? The premise of the piece is that 42[1] has some deeper meaning which H2G2 fans spend their waking hours trying to work out. A task which has apparently become far harder since the death of Douglas Adams in 2001. The article looks for explanations in mathematics, philosophy and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The author even asks Douglas Adams' friend Stephen Fry if he knows the answer. Fry tells him that he knows the answer but that he is sworn to secrecy and must take it to his grave.

Unfortunately, all of this digging ignores one crucial point. In 1993, Douglas Adams wrote a message to the alt.fan.douglas-adams newsgroup which attempted to end this kind of speculation for once and for all. He said:

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story.

Which looks pretty definitive to me.

I suspect that Stephan Fry was well aware of this and was winding the reporter up.

I'm disappointed that the BBC has chosen to mark this anniversary by publishing such nonsense.

[1] On the off-chance that anyone reading this doesn't already know, 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything which the computer Deep Thought calculates after ruminating for 7.5 million years. If you needed this explanation then please do yourself a favour and track down the original radio series or the books.

Last weekend, Derren Brown presented another of his occasional television specials. In this one he told us that he had invented a fool-proof system for predicting the winners of horse races. To demonstrate this system he introduced us to Khadisha who had received anonymous five winning tips from Derren. On the basis of these previous wins she borrowed £4,000 which she wanted to place on one final bit.

What Khadisha and the audience didn't know was that there was no real system. Khadisha was one of 7,776 who Derren had initially contacted. All of those people had been given a tip for the first race. That first race had six runners and each of those horses was sent as the tip to 1,296 of those people. So 1,296 of them had a winning prediction and the other dropped out. This continued for four more races, with 5/6 of the group being eliminated at each stage. Over the course of five races this whittled the original 7,776 people down to one, Khadisha, who had received five winning tips. But because of the way the experiment was arranged, one of the original group had to have received five successful tips. Of course, at the beginning of the project, Derren had no way of knowing which of the original participants this would be.

So after five races, Khadisha is convinced that the system works. But that's because she didn't have the full picture. She only saw the system from her point of view. But that (flawed) perspective gave her enough confidence in the (completely fake) system to borrow a huge sum of money to bet on a horse race.

This was then used as the set-up for a magic trick where her horse loses, but Derren changes her betting slip to be a bet on the winning horse. To me, that's not the interesting part of the programme. To me, the interesting thing is what this experiment shows about the nature of believe.

Going into the final race Khadisha had total confidence in the system. She had seen it working on the five previous races. She didn't know how it worked (if you stop to think about it logically, there's no possible way that it could have worked) but that didn't matter to her. She just knew that it worked.

Of course, if she had seen the full picture there's no way that she would have had the same amount of confidence in the system. If she had seen the full picture then she would have had no confidence in the at all. With all the information, she would never have borrowed that huge sum of money.

Derren hinted that this was a similar process to the one that convinces some people that homoeopathic remedies or alternative medicine works. A small number of people do see positive results following these treatments. But for a far larger number of people there's no effect at all. But you rarely hear about the failures. If you went against you better judgement and tried a homoeopathic remedy that didn't work, you probably wouldn't shout about about it. You'd probably feel a bit embarrassed and want to keep it quiet. It's the tiny number of people who feel better that you hear from. They are the ones who the homoeopaths shout about. They are the people who are only too happy to give you anecdotal evidence about how doctors could do nothing for their mother but how at the first sniff of primrose oil she was leaping around the room again.

Those people are like Khadisha. They don't have the full story. Arguing from your personal experience has no relevance in cases like this. Something that works for you might not have worked at all for the majority of people. You might, like Khadisha, just be the random person who it will work for.

Derren Brown is very interested in this area. In his book Tricks of the Mind he has a great section on evidence and how people jump to conclusions when given incomplete evidence. I really recommend that you read it.

I'm shocked to hear of the death of Kevin Greening at the ludicrously young age of 44. I wasn't listening to the Radio One Breakfast Show when he was presenting that with Zoe Ball but before that, back in 1991, he introduced the Breakfast Show on the sadly-missed Greater London Radio - one of the best shows on the best radio station I've ever listened to.

The BBC Radio Player is no more. The Listen Again streams have all been rebranded to be part of the iPlayer. See this page for more details.

But it doesn't look like very much has changed. From an initial glance it seems that my BBC streams pages are still being built - so my HTML parsing code is still working. That's probably a nice demonstration of the power of CSS. I'll have a closer look over the next few days and make sure that it's all still working as expected.

Of course, the initial idea for the BBC streams pages was to make a place where it was easy to find all of the BBC's radio streams on one page as the BBC didn't have such a page themselves. It's possible that this change may have also added a more easily searchable catalogue page which would render my pages redundant.

I'll poke around and let you know what I find.