I think I’ve mentioned before that I keep a copy of Burkhardt’s Selected Letters of Charles Darwin handy in the smallest room (“for fun“). In this letter to Asa Gray in November 1857, a load is lifted from Chaz’s mind… By the way I must tell you what I heard […]
At the weekend around 12,000 people marched through London in protest against the policies of the Pope. A photo essay on cotch dot net explains why we were there.
It’s ten years since the Road Haulage Industry blockaded oil refineries to complain about the price of diesel, and the whole country ran out of fuel. At At War With The Motorist I ask what has been since then to reduce our dependence on private motorised transport and road haulage […]
Melinda Liu in Newsweek, on sitting the written exam for a Chinese driving license: The most memorable question is the one about intestines. Specifically, it’s a multiple-choice question about what to do if you come across a traffic accident victim with an open abdominal wound from which the small intestine […]
Continuing the China strand on At War With The Motorist, exploring questions that aren’t easy to answer. The main conclusions are that an absolutely staggering number of people die on China’s roads each year, and they do so because on their anarchic roads, inexperienced Motorists drive like idiots. The more […]
This post probably doesn’t quite work, but at At War With The Motorist I continue the thread on shared space by considering the mechanism by which it works: risk compensation — the idea that when traffic management is ripped out, road users will perceive the road to be more risky […]
At At War With The Motorist, I continue the threads on the concept of shared space and on transport in Beijing, looking at how roads work and how road users behave in a city where traffic management is meaningless, and the road belongs to whoever can take it. Read it […]
Boing Boing brings us the story of a San Francisco bike messenger who takes acid at work. To do what I do, I have to be paying attention 100% of the time. My peripheral vision and reflexes are my best friends. Acid is not a drug that lends itself to […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog — this one from December 2008. So, BBC TWO’s Oceans: marine ecology’s answer to Time Team. I get as excited by marine biology as the next nerd, and you don’t have to remind me of the importance of conservation. Somehow, the […]