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Bad reviews are a basic fact of literary life, you might have thought. There are so many different kinds of literary taste, that no book can be all things to all readers. One person’s comfort reading is another’s trash, and what’s thought-provoking to one is high-faluting nonsense to another. But the essential subjectivity of taste is hard to keep in mind when it’s your favourite book that’s getting a pasting: what seemed to the reviewer to be a careful and evidence-based summary of the book’s failing, seems to you to be an attack on your taste, your culture, and your personality. To criticize something you like is tantamount to criticizing you, and that’s personal, damn it!

( It’s this reaction, I think, that explains why responses to bad reviews so often take the form of personal attacks on the reviewer. )

Jim Chisholm asked me to write an article for the newsletter of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign about the public perception of law-breaking among cyclists, how this arises and persists through cognitive biases, and some consequences for campaigners. I think most of the material will be pretty familiar to my readers here, but you never know.

( There’s a general belief in this country that cyclists are a bunch of scofflaws )

A list of Don’ts for women on bicycles, c. 1895 has been doing the rounds. It consists of about 20% good advice (“don’t criticize people’s ‘legs’”) to 80% sexism (“don’t use bicycle slang: leave that to the boys”). But what on earth does this mean:

( Don’t cultivate a ‘bicycle face’. )

Adam Roberts’ 2003 novel Polystom opens with a breathtaking scene: ( Polystom climbed into his biplane one morning, having made up his mind to fly to the moon. )

There’s something about reviewing that has been troubling me for a while: ( how do you decide by which aesthetic standards to measure the work under review? )

Something that stands out from Christopher Tolkien’s History of the Lord of the Rings is the effort that J. R. R. Tolkien put into ensuring the consistency of the chronology.

( The journey to Rivendell was the first big source of trouble )

I’ve been reading Christopher Tolkien’s fascinating account of how his father wrote The Lord of the Rings, in volumes VI–IX of The History of Middle-Earth. And I just saw J. J. Abrams’ 2009 film Star Trek.

( What possible connection could there be between these two? )

I was writing a minifier for Python 2 when I noticed¹ an interesting feature: you can’t express the Python grammar in the form of an operator precedence grammar.

( Background: an operator precedence grammar is one in which every pair of operators have a precedence relation )

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who, for the last couple of decades, has been building increasingly elaborate kinetic sculptures that he calls strandbeesten (beach-animals). Constructed out of plastic tubing, these wind-powered mechanisms walk sideways on legs built from simple mechanical linkages.

His early models, such as the one illustrated in the video below right, could only walk downwind, driven by rigid sails. Later models have wing-like sails that provide propulsion regardless of the wind direction. Still later models use the sails to store compressed air that continues to drive the mechanism during short lulls in the wind.

( The key to the construction of the beasts is Jansen’s linkage )