I’m a New Zealand writer with over thirty years hands-on professional experience as a published author and in publishing. My main interests are in the sciences – physics, particularly, though I’m deeply curious about a lot of stuff, especially the human condition. I have qualifications in writing, music and anthropology among other fields, and hold multiple post-graduate degrees in history. I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society at University College, London. I write a lot. My published writing, sold on merit, includes over 550 articles, academic papers, reviews, novellas and short stories, and over 50 books on topics ranging from travel guides to biography, engineering, military and social history. I’ve been published principally by Penguin Random House.
Hot on the heels of the court ruling that a descending minor-scale motif in Katy Perry’s song ‘Dark Horse’ infringed a descending minor-scale motif in somebody else’s, comes news of another threatened lawsuit, this time involving Lady Gaga’s song ‘Shallow’. Allegedly this ripped off a three-note progression from a song by an unknown artist whose … More And the musical litigation continues
This week’s obscure English word is kugelblitz. It’s another word English has outright stolen – it’s the German term for ‘ball lightning’. However, in its appropriated English sense it’s got a different meaning. It’s a physics term referring to a concentration of energy so apocalyptically huge that it distorts the space-time continuum around on itself, … More The obscure word of the week is kugelblitz
Last week I finally got around to writing the story of the Tarawa coast-watch massacre. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. It’s the story of how 22 New Zealanders, many of them civilians working for the Post and Telegraph Department, were murdered by Japanese occupation forces in October 1942. There’s a memorial … More The Tarawa coast-watch massacre of 1942
In the last ten days there have been announcements about two different giant birds that used to live in New Zealand. There’s a human-sized penguin that flourished during the Paleocene – the first age after the dinosaur extinction event – and a one-metre tall parrot that lived some tens of millions of years later in … More All about New Zealand’s amazing giant dead parrot
I’ve been a bit puzzled by the copyright suit that ended the other week in the US. According to the news reports, pop-star Katy Perry’s 2013 hit ‘Dark Horse’ copied a 2008 song featuring Christian rapper Flame, ‘Joyful Noise’. After a four-year court battle, a jury agreed and Perry, her co-authors and her label were … More Katy Perry, Flame and the magic four-chord progression
This week’s obscure English word is chirospasm. It basically means writers’ cramp – a spasm or cramp of the hand from too much hand writing. Your challenge: write a sentence or two in the comments using this word. Copyright © Matthew Wright 2019
I got a new piece of astronomy software the other day, letting me run simulations according to the laws of physics, however implausible the scenario. I thought it might be fun to see what would happen if a rogue orange-tinted dwarf star – smaller than the average star, but not excessively so – was cut … More The Tangerine Peril destroys the Earth!
