Blood I went to give blood this evening at the Wesley Methodist Church. The first thing I saw when I entered the hall was a man sitting at a table with his arm completely covered in blood. Not sure what had happened: maybe there was a problem with the collection equipment, a broken tube or dodgy clamp. But what an impression it would make if one were a first-time donor!
It's now more than a year since I was run down by a bus. Since then:
Response from Stagecoach: nothing
Response from Stagecoach's insurers: nothing of any use
Police response: no further action
Miles cycled: more than 4,000
So I think it's a win for me overall.
Fancy a bike ride on Sunday afternoon? I'm leading the CTC afternoon ride on 2009-12-06. Meet at 14:15 at the junction of Brookside and Lensfield Road.
The Guardian is normally free of the usual “Cyclists: Threat or Menace?” nonsense, but today it publishes an article by Edmund King, “Beware the iPod zombie cyclist”.
I wouldn’t normally consider this kind of prejudicial rubbish worth commenting on, but someone I respect appears to have fallen for it and there’s aren’t enough characters in Twitter to have a proper argument about it.
So, the first question is, who is Edmund King? Is he a sensible, neutral, commentator whose opinion on whether cyclists are “lycra louts”, “mindless maniacs” or “iPod zombies” is one we ought to take seriously? No, he’s the president of the Automobile Association, that’s who he is. He has a history of writing pro-motorist articles for newspapers, appealing for speed limits not to be reduced (for motorists), for motor vehicles not to be fitted with speed regulators, for Vehicle Excise Duty not to be increased, and so on. He’s a propagandist for the motor car, and no sensible person should read anything he says on the subject without checking their pockets afterwards.
So does what he says make any sense? No it does not. He sets up the trap with two sensible points: (1) you need to know if there’s another vehicle coming up behind you before you move laterally; (2) you need to concentrate while using the roads. These are true for cyclists as well as for motorists. He then slips in the falsehood: (3) cyclists need to hear vehicles behind them. This is wrong because some vehicles are silent (other cyclists) or too quiet to hear against the background noise of traffic (electric cars, or just quiet cars). You can't rely on your hearing: you have to look.
The stupidity of the whole piece is obvious when you consider that motorists, cocooned in their airtight cars, can hear very little at the best of times, and many motorists are listening to their own iPods via their much louder in-car entertainment systems. If it’s fine for motorists to cut themselves off from outside sounds, then why pick on cyclists? Conversely, if it’s bad for cyclists to do so, how much worse for motorists?
The rest of the article is the usual anti-cycling propaganda. “Cyclists keep getting killed by motor vehicles, so we must crack down on cycling.” (I paraphrase slightly.) Is it hard to imagine why the president of the Automobile Association might be keen to place the blame for cyclist fatalities anywhere but on the motorists he represents?
Update: in case you doubt my claim above that this Guardian piece is part of a propaganda campaign to blame cyclists for their own deaths, take a look at how the same story is reported in the Mail, where the equation is made explicit:
The fashion for wearing iPods while cycling has been blamed for a rise in the number of riders being killed or seriously injured. Dubbed the iPod zombies, cyclists who are distracted by thumping tunes blaring in their ears have become the latest menace on Britain's roads. Road safety campaigners fear the fashion for cyclists to wear earphones is partly responsible for the recent upsurge in injuries and deaths. Edmund King, the president of the AA, called for the Department for Transport to launch a campaign warning cyclists of the risk.
It should be clear from these articles what's going on. The Department for Transport has just released its Transport Statistics Bulletin for April–June 2009. In this report one of the most salient figures is that 820 cyclists were killed or seriously injured in this period, an increase of 19% on the same period in 2008.
This figure obviously provides ammunition for pro-cycling campaigners in all their on-going battles for better facilities and changes to legislation. So you can see how important it is for the AA and other anti-cycling campaigners to get their spin in as quickly as possible. And in this case, the spin is that cyclists are to blame for the increase in casualties because they are "iPod zombies". Note that no figures are available for the number of "iPod zombies", or even any evidence that they exist at all. As the Sunday Times says, "It is not known how many of these [deaths and injuries] were caused by people listening to music because the DfT and the police do not record the information." In other words, maybe none of them. But that doesn't matter, because the prejudicial echo chamber is happy to repeat the spin. Meanwhile the president of the AA can pose as a "road safety campaigner".
The headline, which should be "Big increase in cyclist deaths and injuries", becomes "Beware, iPod zombie cyclists are on the rise".
I’m sure FaceBook is fine for keeping track of what your friends are up to, but it seriously sucks for serious discussion. Seriously.
I can’t link to posts. Or rather, I can, but anyone who follows the link who isn’t logged in to FaceBook just gets “You must log in to see this page.” Why should someone have to set up a FaceBook account just to read my comment? And then when they log in they probably find they can’t read it anyway unless they are a “friend” of the poster.
I can’t find posts or comments via search engines.
Any work I put in to writing a comment is hidden away in FaceBook’s walled garden, where it just goes to waste. Why bother when only a set of people that the poster has marked as “friends” can read it?
There’s no syntax for putting links (or italic, or any kind of formatting) into comments. If I paste in a URL it might turn into a link, but then again it might not, depending on what characters are in the URL. And there’s no comment preview, so I can’t tell what’s going to happen.
Comment threads go into a stupid narrow column so that I can only see a couple of hundred words at a time.
Threads longer than two or three comments are hidden so that I can’t read them without clicking.
Individual comments longer than some random length, which seems to differ from one FaceBook page to another, get truncated so that I can’t read them without clicking.
This lack of space strongly encourages short comments, which in a serious discussion means you have to compress and abbreviate what you want to say, and that makes it likely that you'll be misinterpreted, as in the discussion on FaceBook that led to this long blog post on Robin Lustig. Of course I’d like to show you the original FaceBook discussion to back this up, but it would be pointless for me to do that, for reason 1 above.
So, you say, serious discussions aren’t what FaceBook is for? That would be fair enough if you didn’t start them there. I’d like to join in and contribute my opinions, but the whole experience of doing so annoys me so much that my contributions come out really cranky.
Obviously it's up to you what you write and where you write it, and who you allow to read it and comment, but I'd like to appeal to you to start public discussions somewhere public, and with a better commenting interface, at least if you would like me to comment on it without getting annoyed. (Of course you're free not to care about these issues, but I think that would be a shame.)
(This is a reply to a comment of chard on FaceBook which it would be pointless for me to link to for reason 1 above.)
That this House notes with concern the attempts of Royal Mail to restrict access to the postcode database for not-for-profit web services; further notes with alarm that this heavy-handed approach has led to not-for-profit websites which seek to provide essential services to the public being left unable to function; and calls on the Government to ensure that the database is made freely available to anyone for not-for-profit use, thus enabling citizen-focused projects to flourish and innovate.
The Postcode Address File is an important piece of our national information infrastructure: it links postcodes with street addresses and geographical position. This data is critical for research, websites, and information services concerned with geographical locations within the UK. The Royal Mail owns this database, and charges users £3,750 per year¹. This makes it wholly unaffordable for ordinary members of the public, community organizations, small charities, and so on.
David suggested that the RSS feed for garethrees.org should have the full content of the posts instead of the summary. The way he put it was, “It should be up to me how to summarize your feed.”
I wasn’t so sure. At the time my own feed reader was the one built into Safari, which is adequate but not great, and my habit was to visit posts at their own URLs. But (also at David’s suggestion) I tried out Google Reader, and I can now see that with a decent feed reader it makes sense to read most posts in the reader.
I learned some other things from Google Reader. For example, I can see that there are 3 people who subscribe to my feed. Because the date that Google gives for a post isn’t the <pubDate> from the feed but is instead the date on which Google first discovered the post in the feed, I can tell that the first subscriber picked up the feed on 2009-08-12. Welcome, Google readers. You might also be interested in my shared items.
The provocative title of this post is intended to parallel the provocative title of Robin Lustig’s 2009-09-04 post to his blog on the BBC website, in which he asks, “Is Japan a dying nation?”
Mr Lustig introduces his post by explaining that he’s “on the plane back from Tokyo” after a week of reporting on the Japanese election. This could excuse quite a lot. Going to Japan for the first time is quite a mind-blowing experience for a Brit, especially for someone with interest in the Japanese nation: so many things are the same yet somehow different! or different but somehow familiar! You come back imagining that you have acquired a sophisticated understanding of Japanese society and you find yourself unguardedly retailing cultural generalizations. I’ve done all this myself, so I have a certain amount of sympathy. Nonetheless, were I to type up my naivety for everyone to see on one of the most-visited websites in the UK, then I think I’d deserve every bit of criticism that I’m about to heap on Mr Lustig’s article.
I have five criticisms of Lustig: (1) promoting offensive cultural stereotypes; (2) no links or citations to the evidence he relies on; (3) failing to give the context needed to understand his statistics; (4) promoting a bogus theory for Japan’s low fertility; (5) his general attitude to ageing and fertility.
Nicholas Crane (left) and Tony Mulholland (right) measuring a small section of the Scottish coast with a one-metre ruler.
Series 4, Episode 6, “Inner Hebrides to Faroe Islands”, of the BBC television series Coast, bravely tackled the fractal nature of coastlines. (The episode is available on BBC iPlayer until . The segment I’m discussing here starts at 35:30.)
Visiting a stretch of the coast of Scotland near Mellon Udrigle, presenter Nicholas Crane and mathematician Tony Mulholland from the University of Strathclyde measured a short length of rocky coast using rulers of four different lengths, resulting in the increasing series of distances shown below right.
Total length of this section of the coast, as measured with four different lengths of ruler. Note the inability of the programme makers to divide 123 by 2. Note also that this diagram bears little or no relation to the section of coastline actually measured in the programme: on Google Maps you can check that the orange line (labelled “14 m” here) is actually about 300 m long.
Richardson was a Quaker and a pacifist. In World War I he served with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit attached to the French 16th Division, and transported wounded soldiers during the Third Battle of Champagne (1917). After the war he worked for the Meteorological Office on a system for forecasting weather by numerical computation, but when in 1920 the Met was placed under the control of the Air Ministry, Richardson resigned on principle.
While teaching physics at Westminster Training College, he carried out a mathematical study of the nature of warfare. His 1950 book Statistics of Deadly Quarrels systematically collects and analyzes data on wars and other conflicts between 1820 and 1945 to attempt to get quantitative answers to questions like “are some countries or groups inherently more belligerent than others?” “are wars getting more frequent or deadly over time?” “does a common language increase or reduce the chance that two countries or groups will fight?” and so on. He observed, for example, that occurrences of outbreaks of war between pairs of countries appear to obey Poisson statistics, suggesting that many events take place (provocations, accidents, disputes, assassinations etc) each of which has a very small chance of leading to a war.
The problem of the lengths of coastlines arose in the consideration of whether countries with longer borders are more likely to go to war. In order to normalise his data by the lengths of borders, Richardson needed to determine these lengths. However,
An embarrassing doubt arose as to whether actual frontiers were so intricate as to invalidate that otherwise promising theory. A special investigation was made to settle this question. [...] At first I tried to measure frontiers by rolling a wheel of 1.8 centimetres diameter on maps; but there is often fine detail, which the wheel cannot follow; some convention would be needed as to what detail should be ignored and what retained: considerable skill would be needed to guide the wheel in accordance with any such decision; and in practice the results were erratic.
Much more definite measurements have been made by walking a pair of dividers along a map of the frontier so as to count the number of equal sides of a polygon, the corners of which lie on the frontier. [...] Its total length, Σl, has been studied as a function of the length, l, of its side. This process comes down to us from Archimedes, and is standard in pure mathematics. [...]
The west coast of Britain from Land’s End to Duncansby Head was chosen as an example of a coast that looks more irregular than most other coasts in an atlas of the world. [...] As to how the total length Σl may be expected to vary with the length l of the side, I have no theory. Quite empirically the logarithms of these variables were plotted against one another; and a straight line was drawn through the points. More evidence would be needed before one could say whether the deviations from the straight lines are of any interest. I am inclined to regard them as random. The important feature for present purposes is that the slope of the graph is only moderate even for such a ragged line as the western shore of Great Britain. On the straight line in [the plot of log Σl against log l] the total length [Σl] varies inversely, as the fourth root of the side [l], that is
Σl ∝ l−0.25
Richardson found that similar lines of fit could be drawn for other coastlines, with the situation summed up by “the useful empirical formula Σl ∝ l−α where Σl is the total polygonal length, l the length of the side of the polygon, and α is a positive constant, characteristic of the frontier.”
Mandelbrot analyzed Richardson’s exponent −α as 1 − D, where D is the fractal dimension of the frontier. On Coast this concept was mentioned but the programme segment wasn’t long enough to explain it, even at the empirical level of Richardson’s analysis.
So let’s follow Richardson’s procedure ourselves for the Coast measurements, using gnuplot to do the fitting. Here’s the file coast.data:
0.5 61.5
1.0 51.0
2.0 30.0
14.0 14.0
(In the anomalous case of the 0.5 m ruler, I’ve taken the number of steps, 123, as being correct, based on Nicholas Crane being filmed clearly counting to 123. This gives a total length of 61.5 m, not the 64 m reported by the programme.)
Here’s the gnuplot program:
set logscale x
set logscale y
set xlabel "Length of ruler (m)"
set ylabel "Measured length of coast (m)"
f(x) = b * x**(-a)
fit f(x) 'coast.data' via a, b
plot 'coast.data' title "Measurements", f(x) title "Best fit"
The result is shown on the right, and the best-fit procedure finds the constant a ≅ 0.46, giving this very wiggly piece of coast the fractal dimension of 1.46.
Emacs 23.1 was released on . In this review I’ll describe some of the new features in Emacs 23 that seem particularly useful to me, and some features from older versions of Emacs that I’ve only discovered recently, or which I think will be interesting or novel to the Emacs users among my readers. But everyone has different requirements and preferences, so if you find something particularly useful that I’ve missed, why not add a comment? (But if all this just reminds you of how much you’ve always hated Emacs, I’d appreciate it if you could vent your spleen elsewhere, thanks.)
Installing
I had no trouble getting Emacs 23.1 working on Windows: the FSF provides native Windows distributions. Emacs has the easiest installation process of any Windows software I know of: you just unzip the distribution into C:\Program Files or wherever and you’re done. If only other Windows software was so easy to install.
On Mac OS 10.5.7 I tried building from source following the EmacsApp instructions (./configure --with-ns && make && make install), which failed. I tried again after upgrading to 10.5.8 and this time it worked. I have no idea what went wrong, and have no particular desire to go back to 10.5.7 and investigate. If you have problems building Emacs 23, you might try one of the universal binary distributions at Emacs for Mac OS X (which I think could be better advertised).
On Mac OS X I experienced a couple of configuration glitches. First, I found that the Alt key had been assigned to the “Alt” modifier flag, a feature which I don’t use (I prefer the native use of the Alt key for entering accented letters and other characters). I fixed this by customizing ns-alternate-modifier. Second, there’s a problem with the PATH environment variable: Emacs gets the system PATH, not the one from my .profile. This problem is noted on the Emacs wiki together with a solution, but if this is a general problem with Mac OS X as claimed there, why am I discovering this for the first time in Emacs 23?
*** The Emacs character set is now a superset of Unicode.
(It has about four times the code space, which should be plenty).
The internal encoding used for buffers and strings is now Unicode-based and called ‘utf-8-emacs’
What I noticed was an immediate improvement in the handling of some large UTF-8-encoded files I’m working on that contain text from several languages. These now open instantly, whereas in Emacs 22 there were delays while Lisp code was run to decode the characters and convert them to Emacs’ internal encoding.
This change probably doesn’t seem like all that much of a big deal. “It’s 2009 and Emacs has only just switched to Unicode internally?” you might well ask, “What a bunch of late-comers!” But in fact Emacs was early to the party, not late: the difficulty in switching to Unicode internally is because Emacs has had multilingual character support since August 1993 (in the form of MULE 1.0), when Unicode was at revision 1.1 and arguments about Han unification were still a live issue. At this point you had to have very good foresight or a lot of luck to see that Unicode was going to be the solution to multilingual character encoding. (So all credit to the Windows NT developers.)
From the perspective of 1993, it’s not at all obvious that Unicode is a good idea. Out in the real world, people want to edit text in all sorts of character encodings, and the most natural way to support this is to remember which encoding you are working in, and represent the data natively in that encoding. That way you can be sure that you don’t break anything, and it’s easy to extend to support more encodings. In the Unicode paradigm, you have to translate your input from its encoding into Unicode, using large mapping tables defined for this purpose by the Unicode consortium, and then when you write the data back out again you apply the mapping tables in reverse. If you’re going to adopt this approach, you’re going to need a lot of confidence that the Unicode consortium to get these mapping tables right (in particular, the tables need to be injective: different code points in other encodings need to be mapped to different code points in Unicode). You also need the disk space and memory for the tables, which was more of an issue back then (when people used to criticize Emacs for being a bloated application; nowadays Emacs.app is about the same size as iCal.app).
So I don’t think we can criticize the MULE developers for failing to adopt Unicode, and in any case they were constrained by design decisions made in MULE’s predecessor Nemacs (“Nihongo Emacs”) which was first released in June 1987, long before the publication of Unicode 1.0.0 in October 1991.
However, the very success of MULE (in 1993 Emacs was streets ahead of other editors when it came to editing multilingual text, the main difficulty for the user being acquiring the necessary fonts) ended up leading Emacs down a bit of a blind alley. The difficulties of merging MULE into GNU Emacs (not the least of which were the copyright problems) lasted until 1997, when Emacs 20.1 had multilingual support built in. And it wasn’t all that long afterwards that it became clear to everyone that Unicode was the way to go.
So the MULE internals had to be backed out and replaced with new Unicode internals, without breaking too much Emacs Lisp code that interacted with characters and their encodings. This exacting project was carried out by Ken’ichi Handa of the AIST in Tokyo. Some measure of the complexity and delicacy of this ten-year process can be gathered by browsing Handa’s e-mails to the emacs-devel mailing list. The 2003 thread “eight-bit char handling in emacs-unicode” is a good example: Simon Josefsson reports a bug whose cause is that the Emacs Lisp implementation of RFC 2104 (message authentication using cryptographic hash functions) is using Lisp strings to represent arbitrary sequences of 8-bit values (what Emacs Lisp calls “unibyte strings”). This worked fine in MULE, but because of the way it constructs these strings, in the Unicode branch of Emacs these strings end up consisting of encoded characters instead (what Emacs Lisp calls “multibyte strings”) and the message authentication fails.
** New font code.
Fonts are handled by new code capable of dealing with multiple font backends. This uses the freetype and fontconfig libraries.
*** Added support for local fonts (fonts installed on the machine where Emacs is running).
*** Added support for the Xft library for antialiasing.
*** Added support for the otf library for complex text layout by OpenType fonts.
*** Added support for the m17n library for text shaping.
I noticed that on Windows Emacs seems much better at finding fonts for all the characters it needs to display. For example, Emacs 22.3 on Windows was unable to find a font containing ～ (U+FF5E FULLWIDTH TILDE) even though I have several such fonts (resulting in a “missing glyph” box). Emacs 23.1 displays it fine.
The ucs-insert command completes on Unicode character names using wildcards.
Character entry by Unicode name
Suppose you want to enter a MULTIPLICATION SIGN but don’t know how to type it on your keyboard and you don’t happen to remember its Unicode character code. It used to be the case that you had to hunt around in the Character Palette (on Mac OS X) or the Character Map (on Windows). In Emacs 23.1 you can type C-x 8 RET MULTIPLICATION SIGN RET. (C-x 8 RET is the rather awkward key sequence for the ucs-insert command; I suppose I’ll get used to it eventually.)
Actually the situation is much better than that because there’s completion on the set of Unicode character names, so you can just type C-x 8 RET multip TAB s TAB RET. Another example: you can type C-x 8 RET greek capital TAB to get a list of Greek capital letters. And there’s wildcard completion too, so if you want some kind of arrow but you’re not sure which, you type C-x 8 RET *arrow TAB and get a list of all the arrows in Unicode. I think I will have a HEAVY BLACK-FEATHERED NORTH EAST ARROW, please: ➹.
The describe-char command now shows the Unicode name of the character, and a (customizable) set of character code properties, for example:
Character code properties: customize what to show
name: HEAVY BLACK-FEATHERED NORTH EAST ARROW
general-category: So (Symbol, Other)
canonical-combining-class: 0 (Spacing, split, enclosing, reordrant, and Tibetan subjoined)
bidi-class: ON (Other Neutrals)
The list-charset-chars command is also useful: M-x list-charset-chars RET unicode-bmp RET gives you a buffer containing the entire Unicode Base Multilingual Plane.
Native word wrapping
Some history. Word wrapping has previously been a bit of a pain in Emacs. It used to be that you were expected to wrap (“fill” in Emacs terminology) all paragraphs by hand using fill-paragraph (M-q). This was obviously a waste of your time, so you could turn on auto-fill-mode to automatically break lines that got too long. But this only works at the end of a paragraph: if you’re editing lines in the middle of a paragraph, auto-fill-mode doesn’t refill the paragraph for you. (There were add-on libraries for doing this, like Per Abrahamsen’s maniac.el—tagline: “fill paragraphs like a maniac”—and Dave Love’s refill.el.)
However, the problem with all these approaches is that when you “fill” a paragraph, you lose information about which line breaks were inserted deliberately by the author (and should be left alone), and which were inserted automatically for the purposes of wrapping to a certain width (and which can be adjusted automatically). For some kinds of editing, you need to preserve this information.
Emacs 22.1 provided longlines-mode, which distinguished between these two types of line (so-called “soft” and “hard” newlines) using text properties. But this had its own problem, because the soft newlines were inserted when a file was opened, and then removed just before the file was saved, meaning that line numbers were inconsistent between the file on disk and the corresponding buffer in Emacs. And this meant that if you wanted to visit a line in the buffer based on a line number in the output of a command-line tool like grep or p4 diff, you were out of luck.
Emacs 23.1 finally gets it right by adding word wrapping to the display engine, under the control of the visual-line-mode command.
A use-case for transparent editing windows: composing an e-mail while looking at a map, on a screen that’s so small that you can’t position the windows side-by-side. (See also the full-size version.)
Frame transparency
You can change the opacity of your frames by setting the alpha frame parameter to an integer from 0 to 100 (meaning percent opacity). There’s no user interface for this yet (as far as I can tell), but you can evaluate Lisp code like (modify-frame-parameters nil '((alpha 75))).
I used to think that frame transparency was just an amusing thing you could do to show off the rendering capabilities of your windowing system. But on my 12-inch Powerbook, I have found myself really wanting this feature, so that I can simultaneously look at a full-screen document (or video, image, diagram, etc) and compose text in Emacs. On a bigger display I could position the windows side-by-side, but on my laptop there’s not enough room to do that.
Incremental search
When incremental search fails, the search string you entered is coloured to show the initial portion that matched and the remainder that didn’t match. This makes it quicker to recover from typos.
Line numbering
At long last, a proper line numbering feature (with the line numbers in the editor margins, rather than inserted into the buffer): linum-mode.
File completion with wildcards
(New in Emacs 20) You can type C-x C-f *.c TAB and get a list of all your C files to select from. (This probably works best if you’re using a mouse so you can click on the completion you want; typing C-u - C-x o to move to the completion window gets a bit tedious.) You can also type C-x C-f *.c RET to open all your C files in separate buffers.
Edit file names interactively
(New in Emacs 22) Suppose you have a whole bunch of files that need to be renamed: perhaps their files extensions need to be consistently lowercase, or you’d like to suffix each one with the year it was created. This has always been a bit of a tricky problem: you can roll your own solution in shell script, but it always ends up being hairier than you’d like:
for EXT in JPG PNG; do
for FILE in *.$EXT; do
mv $FILE $(basename $FILE $EXT)$(echo $EXT | tr A-Z a-z);
done;
done
Or you can use a specialized tool like rename (if you have it). Perhaps something like this:
rename -v 's/\.(JPG|PNG)$/.\L\1/' *.{PNG,JPG}
(That’s untested! I hope you remember to use the -n option whenever you use rename.)
Anyway, in Emacs 23 you can visit a directory in Dired mode (C-x d) and then run the dired-toggle-read-only command (C-x C-q) and then edit the filenames by typing, by using query-replace-regexp or string-rectangle, or however you like. When you’re done, type C-x C-q again and each file whose name you changed gets renamed.
This seems like magic the first time you do it, but it’s really handy not just because you have all the editing features of Emacs at your disposal, but because you get a preview of your changes: you can look over them, correct mistakes, and revert them if you don’t like them (using the revert-buffer command as usual).
(You can also edit some of the other file metadata in the Dired buffer, such as the permissions.)
Replacement with evaluation
Emacs 21 introduced the commands (query-)replace-regexp-eval, which are like (query-)replace-regexp but instead of a replacement string, you provide an arbitrary Lisp expression to generate the replacement text. Emacs 22 obsoleted these functions with three new escape sequences for the replacement string in (query-)replace-regexp:
\? is a placeholder for a string that you enter interactively for each replacement. (It only works for replace-regexp, not query-replace-regexp, where you can always type e to edit the replacement text. For example, you can add comments to all your uncommented integer variables by typing M-x replace-regexp RET ^\s-*int\s-+\s_+;$ RET \& /* \? */ RET.
\# expands to the count of replacements already made by the replacement command. So you can number the lines in your file (starting at zero) by typing C-M-% ^ RET \# SPC RET !. Not all that useful by itself, but very useful in combination with:
\, evaluates the following Lisp expression, converts the result to a string and includes it in the replacement text.) Back-references like \1 can appear in the Lisp expression (where they get turned into (match-string 1) etc.), as can escape sequences like \# and \?. For example, to number the lines in your file starting at 1, type C-M-% ^ RET \,(1+ \#) SPC RET !. To multiply all the integers in your file by 5, type C-M-% [0-9]+ RET \,(* (string-to-number \&) 5) RET !. (A slight shame about the need for string-to-number there.)
\, is a feature that I use almost every day.
Emacs Lisp as a scripting language
(New in Emacs 22) You can put #!/usr/bin/emacs --script at the top of your Emacs Lisp files and run them from the shell.
When I was cycling to Warsash the other week, I stopped at the George in Odiham and ordered their sticky toffee pudding. It was very large and very sweet, and even though I couldn't finish the whole thing, afterwards I wasn't hungry for more than 30 rather hilly miles, which suggests that the whole pudding had a lot more than 1,000 kcal.
It was just what I needed, but the hotel can't get all that many long-distance cyclists or manual labourers. So who is it for?
One of the things about the Tour de France that may seem odd to non-cyclists is that there are three separate competitions going on at the same time: the general classification, based on total overall time (yellow jersey); the points competition, for winning sprints and stages (green jersey); and the king of the mountains competition, for winning climbs to the tops of mountain passes (polka dot jersey).
Why is this? It’s because people with different body types are good at different types of cycling, and the multiple competitions allow more cyclists to take part competitively in the race. Cyclists with large bodies and a preponderance of Type I (“fast-twitch”) muscle fibres are good sprinters; cyclists with small bodies and a preponderance of Type II (“slow-twitch”) muscle fibres are good climbers; and cyclists with intermediate physiques have a chance at the general classification.
The difference between these types of physique is quite dramatic. I’m a climber, so when I go out with the Cambridge Cycling Club, I can keep up with cyclists who are substantially faster than me on the flat, so long as there are enough hills on our route. On the climbs, I use my better power-to-weight ratio; on the descents and flats, they use their better power-to-surface-area ratio to leave me behind.
My participation in the study involves wearing an ActiGraph GT3X activity monitor for a week to see how much exercise I get. (In passing, $335 seems like a lot of money for a device which basically consists of a three-axis solid state accelerometer and 4 MB of memory on a 3 cm PCB. I guess that’s low production volumes for you, and maybe the rigours of medical certification: a Wii Remote is a much more sophisticated piece of kit, and that retails for $40.)
It will be interesting to see (when or if the researchers eventually publish) how they’ll deal with two obvious sources of bias. First, their sample is (at least partly) self-selected (they recruit participants who sign up at their website; I don’t know what other avenues of recruitment they have), and these participants will differ from the general population in lots of ways, not all of which will be easy to control for. It seems quite likely that people who volunteer for a study on activity will be more active than the population in general. Second, the problem of reactivity: people change their behaviour when they are being observed. It seems certain that someone whose activity is being monitored will undertake more activity than they normally would. For example, if I weren't taking part in the study I might have taken more notice of the weather forecast and not done any cycling this afternoon. However, this second source of bias applies to all participants in this study (and indeed in any study that monitors activity), so it probably doesn't invalidate comparisons; it's just the absolute numbers that are affected.
What is the point of this survey? The obvious conclusion will be that people who cycle or the half dozen people who walk to work are healthier than those who drive or take a bus. What a surprise. The eventual report will probably miss the fact that there is a difference between correlation and causation. So for example, for people who work in Cambridge, richer people generally live closer to their workplace and are more likely to cycle, and of course richer people are generally healthier.
The particular causative relation alleged here (richer people choose to live closer to their workplace) may or may not be true, but it illustrates a potential source of bias: commuting distance is not an independent variable because peoples choices about where to live and work may be correlated with their choice of commuting mode.
However, the blogger goes on to suggest that the researchers may be motivated to ignore this source of bias in order to reach politically correct conclusions:
But the way the conclusion of the study will be pushed is that if only the peasants could be forced to cycle 10 miles, or walk 5 miles across a muddy field, to get to work, then the world would be a better place. It is unfortunate that at a time when the UK research councils are going to be forced to tighten their belts, that money is diverted from real research to this kind of pointless academic middle class exercise.
Advanced Photo System was a 24 mm film format introduced in 1996 by a consortium of film and camera manufacturers, including Kodak, Fuji, Canon, Minolta and Nikon. The Canon Elph (Ixus in Europe) was released the same year. It was a beautiful camera: according to Wikipedia “at the time, the world’s smallest autofocus camera”.
Elph 370Z, a compact autofocus APS camera released by Canon in 1998. Photo by pointnshoot. Licence: CC-BY.
My camera was an Ixus Z70, the European version of the Elph 370Z you can see at the right. The bulging lens housing marred the elegant lines of the original Elph/Ixus, but it did have the compensation of 3× zoom. I used it for about five years and shot 34 rolls: 1,080 photos (which may not seem like very many in this digital age, but the fact that each exposure cost about £0.40 was a bit of a restraint). The camera was stolen when my house was burgled in 2005.
1,080 photos.
APS was a very short-lived film format. It arrived at the wrong time, just as film was about to be replaced by digital in almost all niches of the photography business. By 2000, digital cameras were clearly a better choice in the ultra-compact autofocus niche where APS had been most successful, and in 2004, only eight years afer introducing the format, Kodak stopped manufacturing APS film altogether. Ever since I heard the news, it’s been bugging me that I ought to get round to digitizing my APS photos while it’s still possible to find someone to do it. Minority formats have a habit of becoming obsolete quickly, and if I wait too long I might find that it’s no longer possible to convert the format. So from time to time I’ve been looking around for someone who can offer me a good price for digitizing all my APS film.
The curious thing about this search is that several photography businesses have felt obliged to explain to me why I shouldn’t have been using the APS format in the first place. A salesman at Campkins Cameras on Rose Crescent spent a couple of minutes lecturing me on how the APS format had been forced on the photographic industry by the manufacturers and that they hadn’t wanted to adopt it at all (Campkins can’t digitize APS film, in case you were wondering). Another company responded to my query with the admonishment, “I'm sorry but we do not have any facilities to either print or scan APS film as it considered an amateur film and we mainly deal with professionals”. Yes, thank you, photography companies, I don’t need you to tell me that I’m a rubbish photographer, I only wanted to find out if I could, like, pay you to digitize my photos.
I guess this is a case of professionals not understanding that amateurs can have very different requirements. Here’s an article about APS by Philip Greenspun from 1997 showing the same slightly blinkered attitude: “An APS negative is 56% the area of a 35 mm negative. That's all that a serious photographer really needs to know about the format. Everything else is gadgetry.” However, Greenspun includes a very sensible counterpoint from Kleanthes Koniaris, and a lot of the comments are insightful too. Some of them are quite funny, like this one from 1999: “Like digital photography, I feel that APS will have little or no effect on professional photography.” How’s that prediction looking now?
The key advantage of APS for an amateur like me was that it enabled manufacturers to make cameras small enough to slip into a pocket and robust enough to carry around in that pocket all day, and that made it much more likely that the camera would actually be to hand when I wanted to take a photo. It’s no good owning some fancy-pants piece of kit if its size and delicacy means that you don’t carry it with you. There’s no way I would have wanted to carry a 35 mm camera up a cliff or down a couloir, but the Ixus went with me in my trouser pocket. A poor quality photo is a lot better than no photo at all, and anyway, how likely is it that I’d get a good quality photo even if I did have a fancy camera? I know from my attempts to take photos with my parents’ Leica M4 that I don’t have the patience for anything beyond point-and-shoot.
APS also made some user interface improvements over 35 mm: there was no difficulty in spooling the film (you just dropped the cartridge in via a hatch); no chance of double exposures or missed frames (all winding was automatic); no way to ruin exposures by accidentally opening the back (the hatch locked until the film was rewound into the cartridge); no confusion between shot and unshot rolls (the cartridges had an indicator, and anyway the camera refused to shoot film twice). This kind of thing doesn’t matter to the professional who has long since refined their working methods to the point where they forget how novice mistakes are even possible.
Anyway, there are plenty of companies out there who will digitize APS photos, but most are a bit expensive for someone with 1,080 exposures. Jessops on Green Street wanted to charge me £0.50 per exposure, about twice the cost of developing the film in the first place. I was about to write, “at that price it would have been cheaper to buy my own scanner,” but I’m not sure that’s true: no-one seems to make APS batch scanners (like the CanoScan FS2710 or the Minolta Scan Dual IV) any more, so buying one would involve a lot of hunting around on auction sites, with no guarantee of finding a working model at a reasonable price.
Eventually I found PictureLizard in Swindon, which has very generous volume discounts: I paid just £0.15 an exposure. The quality is, to be honest, not that great: the scans are about 1,600 dots per inch (about 1,500 pixels across a 24 mm exposure) and are rather grainy (on the other hand, the originals were not all that great either). One of the rolls was left-right reflected; it must have been fed into the scanner back to front. The photo metadata (dates and times) were not captured by the scanning process. The accidental reflections were easy to fix; restoring the dates (by reference to the printed copies) took some time. Still, at that price I can’t complain.
Here are twelve of my favourites. Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.
Finish of the London to Brighton charity bicycle ride, 1998-06-21.
Pavey Ark and Stickle Tarn from Harrison Stickle, English Lake District, 1998-07-18.
At the weekend I went on a cycle tour to Warsash and back:
Friday: Cambridge to Warsash, 220 km (137 miles)
Sunday: Warsash to Staines, 107 km (67 miles)
Monday: Staines to Cambridge, 131 km (81 miles)
Click the photos for larger versions.
Key to photos (anticlockwise from top left):
A foggy morning on the A603 in Cambridgeshire. It was cool and damp at 05:30 and a light fog blanketed the fields.
The Greyhound pub on the B656 near St Ippollytts in Hertfordshire. It was open at 07:30 on Friday for breakfast, and with a sign offering a “cyclist special”, how could I resist? Coffee and waffles were just what I needed. (I took the photo on the way back, which is why it is sunny. Sadly the pub was closed at 14:30 when I passed on Monday, so I can’t comment on its lunches.)
An awkward junction in the South Downs, Hampshire. On Sunday afternoon I got quite lost in this little maze of lanes southwest of Empshott. The sign points to Froxfield, Petersfield, and Privett. I did not come from any of these places, nor was I going to any of these places. And the fourth arm of the crossroads was missing from my map, but very present on the ground. I ended up going the correct way, but I was quite certain I had gone wrong.
Another awkward junction in the same maze of lanes. The sign points to Froxfield, Priors Dean, and Hawkley. I wasn’t going to any of these places either. This area is very beautiful and would reward exploring with a better map or more accurate directions!
Empshott Green, Hampshire. At last, I had escaped from the maze.
Colin Bell asked, “Do you have any good resources for planning long-distance rides? Some friends are wanting to do Cambridge–Chepstow...” So here’s more than you might ever want to know about how I planned the trip. Bear in mind that this is the first multi-day cycle tour I’ve done, so I’m probably not a good fount of knowledge here. For advice from experienced cycle tourists, you probably want to try the Touring & Expedition section of the CTC forums.
I planned the trip using the “Get Directions” feature of Google Maps. With mode set to “Walking”, it does a pretty good job of generating cycling routes. (Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t yet know about very many footpaths; when it does, the “Walking” directions will be less useful to cyclists ... but maybe Google can add a “Cycling” mode which avoids trunk roads as well as footpaths. If any Googlers are reading this, please suggest this to the maps team.) I also tried doing my own planning using paper maps, but basically Google did a better job. The trouble with doing my own long-distance route planning is that I can’t hold all the alternative routes in my head, so I end up committing to an initial section of route and then trying to find good routes forward from there instead of backtracking to consider alternatives. In particular, I don’t think I would have found the very nice route through the Chilterns via Flaunden on my own.
I looked at the journey planner at cyclestreets.net but that limits you to journeys of 30 km or less. OK for commuters, not so good for tourists. (But I quite understand why they have this limit—route planning is computationally intensive. They are doing fantastic work on very little in the way of funding.)
A route under the M4, according to the Sustrans mapping system, but not actually a cycle path.
I also looked at Sustrans, but their routes generally link centres of population, whereas the touring cyclist wants to avoid these places. They had almost nothing going my way, and what they had I was slightly suspicious of. I could have taken the Colne Valley Trail from Uxbridge to Rickmansworth (avoiding Harefield), part of route 61, but on the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 sheet 176 this route is marked as a footpath, not a bridleway or cycle path. So I decided not to risk it. Sustrans also show a cycle route passing under the M4 northwest of Harmondsworth (see right), which I did take a chance on. This turned out to be a bad idea. The route petered out into a maze of recreational bridleways and footpaths filling the area bounded by the M4, M25, and a Harmondsworth industrial estate. After much searching, I found the path I wanted, but it’s a footpath, not a bridleway or cycle path, and moreover, it’s closed. So I had to backtrack and go through Harmondsworth after all. A mistake that cost me at least 10 kilometres.
Where Google Maps suggested a route that involved long sections of trunk road, I looked for nearby quieter roads, and added additional destinations accordingly. You can see these additional destinations in the pins on the map above:
Cambridge.
Steeple Morden. This avoids a long section of the A10 and A505. (Although I have cycled the A10 to Royston, and sections of the A505, these are not enjoyable roads.)
Bedmond. The small lanes though Bedmond in several directions are the nicest way to avoid the confluence of the M1, M10 and M25.
Golden Pot. This steers the route to the west, staying outside the M25 and passing through a lovely section of the Chiltern Hills around Flaunden. (But actually going through Golden Pot was a bit of a mistake; see below.)
Medstead. Avoids a busy section of the A32.
Warsash.
Basing Dean, and ...
Empshott. Without these two, Google Maps directs you along the A32 and A31. With them, the route goes east into a pleasant section of rolling hills around Froxfield.
Elstead. Otherwise Google prefers the A325 and A323. Even via Elstead, there’s still a section of the A324, but I couldn’t see any way to avoid this without going several kilometres out of the way, for example, via Ash Vale.
Staines.
Harefield. I wanted to find a different route back to Cambridge, for example through Hertford and Braughing, but getting from Staines to Hertford involved seemingly endless kilometres of northwest London, or else a big diversion. So I settled for going back on the same route I came out.
Big A roads are not always bad. I had been dreading this bit of A40 and A335 (see right) which seemed to be the only sensible place I could get across the M40, but in fact it was fine, with enormous lanes giving plenty of room for even the biggest of juggernauts to safely pass a cyclist.
By contrast, the worst road on the whole trip was this section of the B3349 from Odiham to Golden Pot. It looked innocuous enough when I was planning, but it was horrible: very busy, and too narrow for two lanes of traffic plus a cyclist, so queues of motor vehicles would build up behind me, and there was no shoulder or verge I could pull onto to let them past. Had I known I would have gone on one of the slightly longer alternatives, through Herriard to the west, or Long Sutton to the east.
Having got a route planned, I checked it against my Ordnance Survey maps to make sure it wasn’t directing me down footpaths or the wrong way down one-way streets. The result was a series of instructions, of which this is a typical extract:
170.2 L@ Village St 0.5
170.7 1x Holt End Ln 2.0
172.7 C- Trinity Rd 0.6
173.3 C- Trinity Hill 0.8
MEDSTEAD
174.1 C- Church Ln 0.1
174.2 R@ Wield Rd 0.3
174.5 L@ Common Hill 1.0
175.5 Slight R@ Bighton Rd 1.2
BIGHTON
176.7 C- Chalky Hill 2.5
179.2 Slight R@ Bighton Dean Ln 0.5
179.7 L@ Bighton Ln 2.9
I carried these instructions in my pocket and consulted them as I was riding along, so that I only had to stop to look at the map when I was confused or unsure or when the instructions didn’t seem to match the actual junction layout. The map I carried on the bike was the OS 1:250,000 South East England which conveniently covered the whole of the trip and generally had just enough detail to correct any navigational errors. But if I were doing it again, I’d use the 1:100,000 series maps, although I would have needed to take four of them.
This all seems like a lot of work, but that’s because with 220 km to cycle in a day, time spent on navigation becomes really significant. There were about 200 junctions on the first day’s route, and even if I had only spent half a minute reading the map at each junction, that would have been getting on for two hours! So preparing directions that I could read and follow while riding the bike was important.
In the CTC forum, commenter thirdcrank points out that long-distance cycle touring, and the navigational problems thereof, have become more difficult over the years: “the problem nowadays is often that the main roads are simply unpleasant for cycling. When Britain's road network was still unmodernised—up to the late 1960s, say, the A roads took the easiest route through the hills and as most freight went by train and there were many fewer cars, the journey from Manchester to Cambridge [250 km] would have been a doddle. You would simply have followed the signs for Nottingham, Peterborough, then Cambridge.”
A hand-held GPS device might be a good alternative to printed directions. I don’t have any experience with such a thing, but if it’s reliable and you can keep it from getting rained on, it’s probably a better solution because it can tell you when you make a mistake, and it won’t get confused by networks of nameless roads in the way that I did around Froxfield.
If you’re doing shorter distances, say 80–100 km a day, you can easily afford to figure out your route as you go along. As commenter pq says in the CTC forum, “Just remember that all you're doing is riding a bike around in your own country. It's not a big deal and there's no need to mount a military style operation to accomplish it.”
Like some of my friends, I’ve having trouble deciding who to vote for in the European elections. I agree in general terms with the European policies of both the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party. I’m leaning Green at the moment: I like the Green Party manifesto more than the Liberal Democrats manifesto (with exceptions, some of which I note below), mainly because of its greater detail and specificity.
The tactical voting considerations are also quite strong: it’s not likely that the Lib Dems can get a second seat in the East of England constituency (they’d need at least another 10% or so over their 2005 result) whereas the Greens might be able to get one seat (they might only need another 5% or so). However, there are some arguments the other way.
For the Liberal Democrats:
My Westminster MP, David Howarth, seems pretty good. He’s sound on several issues I care about (civil liberties, identity cards, climate change), he wrote decent replies to my letters, and he seems to be innocent of corruption. So I think the party deserves some kind of reward for his hard work.
Against the Greens:
I strongly object to their proposal for “An immediate halt to xenotransplantation, genetic manipulation and cloning of animals” [manifesto, page 28].
I don’t think their energy policy adds up: they plan “to campaign for an end to nuclear power throughout Europe, and against any new nuclear plants”, and they say that “current coal station schemes must be cancelled” [manifesto, page 11]. But that’s going to leave a big gap between energy generation and consumption, and I don’t believe that their proposals for renewable energy and increased efficiency are sufficient to fill the gap in time (based on the analysis in Sustainable Energy by David MacKay).
I don’t like their association with animal rights extremists. Their candidate Rupert Read is a “frequent participant in demos over the years at places such as Huntingdon Life Sciences”. I don’t approve of guilt by association, but some of the anti-HLS protesters are really vile people and that’s hard to set aside emotionally.
However, that’s a fairly small list of objections, and it’s not likely that the Greens will actually have the power to implement any of the things I object to. So maybe I should vote for Mr Read despite my worries.
The Peter Burkinshaw thing reminded me of this e-mail exchange I had a few years ago with “Dr. Phill Edwards” of the BNP.
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From: gareth.rees@pobox.com
To: pressoffice@bnp.org.uk
Subject: RE: Mixed-race marriages
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 22:43:53 +0100
I see from your web site <http://www.bnp.org.uk/faq.html#mixedrace> that you are against mixed-race relationships. Is your view a matter of conscience or do you propose to legislate to ban or restrict mixed-race relationships? I couldn't find the answer on your web site.
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From: pressoffice@bnp.org.uk
To: gareth.rees@pobox.com
Subject: RE: Mixed-race marriages
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 04:43:24 -0400
Our web site makes it clear why we don't approve of race mixing. We would not ban or legislate against them but we would ban the promotion of mixed race liasons and allow people to make their own choice without being persuaded that it's "cool" to have black/white partnerships. Adverts, soaps, TV dramas always show a positive picture of mixed race liasons (as they do with queers) and, of course, anyone who disaproves in public is immediately condemned as a "racist" (or "homophobe"). Apart from the obvious problem in multiracial Britain of chance encounters by people from different races, I believe that if people are allowed to make up their own minds, uncluttered by media conditioning, they will choose "partners" from their own racial group. It's a matter of evolutionary biology.
Dr Phill Edwards BNP National Press Officer
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From: gareth.rees@pobox.com
To: pressoffice@bnp.org.uk
Subject: Re: Mixed-race marriages
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 15:56:17 +0100
Thank you for your reply. I have a couple of questions.
You propose to legislate against the promotion of mixed-race relationships in television programmes and in television advertising?
Do I understand you correctly? What about newspapers, magazines and other printed materials? What about plays?
For example, under your proposed legislation, would it be permissible to stage a play of Othello? To show a movie of Othello on television? To publish the text of the play in print?
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From: pressoffice@bnp.org.uk
To: gareth.rees@pobox.com
Subject: Re: Mixed-race marriages
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 15:29:23 -0400
I'm sure you are aware that at the present time there are a number of quangos which regulate adverts (ASA), print (PCC), content of TV soaps, plays etc - so there is legislation currently in place to regulate these outlets. We would increase this to prevent the promotion of inter racial liaisons and the activities of queers using the existing laws. After all, if the regulators currently allow offensive material to be printed, broadcast etc then we would improve the situation. We would also remove restrictions on what can and cannot be said in order to allow free and open debate about topics which are now censored eg the desirability or not of multiculturalism and multiracialism. There would be exemptions when appropriate eg Othello. Me - I would like to see the Black and White Minstrel show back on the BBC. Fox (the BBC boss who pulled it) said it was the most popular TV show at the time yet it had to go. So much for the rights of the native white people of the UK
The Cambridge Cycling Campaign asked all the candidates standing in the local elections for their views on issues that are important to people who cycle in Cambridge.
Here are the answers given by Peter Burkinshaw, standing for the UK Independence Party in East Chesterton ward:
CCC: Question 1. There is a major shortage of cycle parking all around the city. Cycle theft is over 10% of all reported crime in the County. Do you have any suggestions for locations for cycle parking? Would you be willing to see a very small proportion of on-street car parking being replaced by on-street cycle parking in your ward? How will you progress towards a situation where every resident and every worker in each ward can keep a bike safe?
Burkinshaw: No
CCC: Question 2. Do you support our view that traffic policing (including fining of cyclists without lights or using pedestrian-only pavements) should become a greater police priority?
Burkinshaw: No
CCC: Question 3. We believe that 20mph should be the norm for local streets in residential areas (as distinct from main connecting roads). 20mph would: greatly encourage walking and cycling; improve the quality of life in an area for residents; and would not delay car journeys significantly (because only the start/end of a journey would be affected). Do you agree that 20mph should become the norm for local streets in Cambridge and surrounding villages?
Burkinshaw: No
CCC: Question 4. If the County Council's proposed Congestion Charge goes ahead, it is likely that the associated up-front money that would be received from the government to support prior improvements to public transport and cycling would be of the order of some £500m spread over five years. This is roughly ten times the amount the County currently receives for transport. If the scheme goes ahead, what would be your priorities for use of this up-front money?
Burkinshaw: To reduce the Council tax
CCC: Question 5. The Haling Way / Penny Ferry path is part of a national cycle route. Its entranceway is currently being remodelled, at considerable cost. We believe that a diagonal entrance into the path should have been created, rather than the current ‘wiggle’ round a blind corner and use of the pavement. This has not been done because it would involve removal of a few more car parking spaces. Do you feel that this cycle route should have a proper entrance for cyclists, even if it means the loss of three or four parking spaces?
Burkinshaw: No
CCC: Question 6. Do you have any other general cycling-related comments or points? And what support have you given for cycling and walking, or sustainable transport more generally, in the past?
Burkinshaw: Provision for cyclists is already adequate. Please remember that motorists are the people who pay to use the roads whereas cyclists are "freeloaders". They are entitled to use the roads but not disproportionately. If everyone cycled, as you suggest, there would be no roads to ride on.
It seems to be the season for punctures. On Saturday I was cycling into town when I spotted a cyclist standing disconsolately by the road, staring at his back wheel. So I stopped and fixed his puncture for him.
Then on Sunday I went out with the touring group of the Cambridge Cycling Club. We were supposed to be going to Grafham Water, but we had two punctures, so we ran out of time and had to come back. And then we had another two punctures on the way back.
Thanks to the feeble government attempts to encourage an increase in cycling, road layouts, both old and new, continue to be peppered with lethal designs for cyclists, the police continue to be indifferent to reports of road rage or just plain terrible driving towards cyclists and one often has to really push for a prosecution. Even if a prosecution does find its way to the courts, the judges take ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ as a water-tight excuse for ploughing into a cycling group, on a straight road, in daylight. [...] This hate of cyclists extends to whole UK towns now.
I don’t necessarily endorse everything in Polaine’s rant, but that’s not really the point—it’s the feeling of being a member of a minority under siege that he’s expressing, and it’s one that I share from time to time. On a sunny weekend, cycling is so enjoyable that it would be easy to forgetaboutalltheunpleasantness if you weren’t reminded of it every day in the news.
The story of the sabotage of the 2009 Étape Caledonia is really quite extraordinary. The Étape Caledonia was the first British cyclosportive to be held on roads closed to traffic. The Independent reported:
An audacious act of sabotage threw one of Britain's biggest cycle races into chaos yesterday when a protester, presumably angered by road closures for the annual 3,500-cyclist Etape Caledonia, scattered the road with grey carpet tacks, puncturing hundreds of tyres. [...] The sabotage throws into doubt the ability of the UK cycling organisations to host the type of closed-road events common on the continent.
The same day that the Étape Caledonia was sabotaged, several roads in the centre of Manchester were closed for the Great Manchester Run. As far as I know no-one attempted to injure Haile Gebrselassie or any of the other runners.
So what kind of antisocial thug would take out his frustrations at the road closure by cold-bloodedly attempting to injure the 3,500 particpants in the cyclosportive? Here’s the Daily Record:
Alex Grosset, 62, was arrested at his home in the early hours of yesterday morning. He is expected to appear before Perth Sheriff Court today to face reckless conduct charges relating to thedisruption of the Etape Caledonia event through Perthshire on Sunday. Grosset is the chairman of the Rannoch and Tummel Community Council and a member of the local Rotary club.
So this pillar of the community considers the lives of cyclists to be so worthless that it was reasonable to risk them to make a political protest.
The mayor and an entourage—about 10 cyclists or so—were looking at options for a new cycle route - as a curious fellow cyclist I tagged along as I was on my way in to work in Canary Wharf following the same route. The back doors of the lorry flew open as it overtook us and the bolt on the right-hand door picked up a parked car through its front windscreen and swung it round at head-height, brushing past a few of the cyclists and then landing it back on all four wheels a little further down the road.
I think every cyclist will recognize something here: there’s a kind of psychological compulsion to overtake cyclists that affects a (luckily very small) minority of drivers. This compulsion leads drivers to make extraordinary efforts to get ahead of cyclists even when it can’t possibly do them any good, such as racing to overtake when coming up to a queue of stationary vehicles, or to a traffic light that’s red. Combined with narrow streets this compulsion can be deadly, as these drivers make desperate attempts to overtake cyclists when approaching a gap that’s too narrow for both of them.
What can we do? We could identify these drivers and ban them—but I think that as a society we’re clearly not willing to do this. Something we could try instead would be to redesign roads so that drivers of motor vehicles no longer feel compelled to make these dangerous manoeuvres. That means taking out width restrictions, central reservations, and the kind of on-road parking that you can see in the video, and using the space so gained to put in wide cycle lanes or separated cycle paths. It’s the kind of project that’s esily within the powers of an advanced industrial society like ours. If the Dutch can do it, then so can we.
But we’d have to have politicians who valued the lives of cyclists more than their own driving convenience, unlike the councillor for Rannoch and Tummel. And I don’t see how to get there from here.
Since the weather was so nice on Sunday, I went on this ride with the CCC in the morning (that's me in black in the photo), and then on this ride with the CTC in the afternoon. I failed to eat enough lunch, and even more foolishly failed to carry any food with me, so I completely ran out of glycogen on the climb up to Barley in Hertfordshire. Fortunately the Chequers pub was serving food and after a bowl of crumble and custard I had enough energy to make it to tea in Litlington. Just over 100 miles for the day (including three ascents of Chapel Hill near Barrington!), but I need to improve my eating skills.
The starlings in the neighbourhood are fledging at the moment. The fledgelings are still rather poor fliers—they make short flights from the perch where their parents are waiting and then turn around and go back. When the parents look for things to eat, the fledgelings follow them around and pester them for food. There are only about four or five families, but they are very noisy.
The blackbirds in the pyracantha by the door have not yet flown the nest, but it can’t be long now. There are two chicks, but they are rather camera-shy. In the photo I think you can just about see the beak and eye of the one on the left, but the one on the right is head-down.
But there's more to the advert's failure than its hideous use of colour schemes. Every aspect of it is bad. The framing is bad. The sound is bad. The script is bad. For all their talk about representing the Great British Worker, when it comes to promotional material, the BNP can't even represent the most basic British craftsmanship.
Is this a dangerous approach to be taking? If one of your arguments against the BNP is that they are rubbish at making television commercials, then on that day that the BNP have enough money to make something a bit more professional, you end up looking a bit refuted.
On the other hand, if you appear to be taking them seriously, you end up loaning them a bit of your credibility, at least as some kind of worthy opponent. So maybe the best rhetorical strategy is ridicule?
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Private Eye often chooses to criticize someone by contrasting their pious words with their shameful deeds, or their words at one time with their words at another. For example, from this week:
“Sir Fred Goodwin should not be counting on being £650,000 a year better off. It’s a huge amount of money for nothing. The Prime Minister has said it is not acceptable and the government will take action. [...] Sir Fred should not be counting on this. It might be enforceable in a court of law this contract but it's not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that's where the Government steps in.” — Harriet Harman, interviewed on BBC, 1 March
“People have claimed in good faith under the system. MPs make the claim under the system and it’s for the House of Commons fees office to decide whether it comes within the rules. MPs make their claims under the rules and the money is paid out only if they are satisfied that the claim is within the rules.” — Harriet Harman, interviewed on BBC, 8 May
It makes for effective satirical comment to have the accused condemn themselves with their own words. But when the tactic is used week after week it starts to give the impression that the fault being criticized is purely the hypocrisy of saying one thing and doing another, and if only the person had got their story straight they would have been fine.
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gareth_rees's journal
The 2009 Étape Caledonia: cyclists waiting for the road to be cleared. Photo by 
