According to SCIENTISTS, “pollution is not improved by c-charge.” (“Improved”? These scientists are so sloppy with their language.) Journalists all over the city are this week reporting that the congestion charge has not reduced air pollution problems in central London, and that’s a fact, proven by science. (As far as […]
It’s 1.1 miles north to south. It’s 0.9 miles west to east. A small and dense market town of just under 7,000 people. There are a few small villages but also several large towns all around it, many a short hop away on the mainline railway, so its wider catchment […]
I wrote this on the old incarnation of cotch dot net in 2008, before it became strictly for photography stuff, so I’m archiving it here. I wrote it after wasting several weeks attempting to engage with an avid reader of a specific online magazine. — This totally really happened to […]
The doctor’s representatives BMA and the “Road Safety” charity Brake both say “yes”. The Automobile Association and the cyclists say “no”. They can’t both be right. Unless the answer is “yes and no”. Find out how that could be so, at At War With The Motorist…
A good review of a medical intervention starts by explaining the population being studied. The Cochrane review of helmets for preventing head injuries in bicyclists explains that its population is the set of bicyclists who sustained an injury that was sufficiently major to make them go to the ER for […]
In rare events like bicyclist injuries, odds ratios can be used as an approximation of relative risk: that is, how much a medical intervention changes the risk of a specific outcome. An odds ratio of 0.3 is interpreted as a 70% reduction in risk of head injury when wearing a […]
According to the Cochrane Collaboration — the source that most doctors will go to for their summary of the evidence — it is five studies from the 1980s and 1990s. Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…
I know a lot of you find the whole helmets thing — whether they “help” or “work” or not — tiresome and unimportant. Well tough. Bicycle helmets are a medical intervention — a special kind of medical intervention — and whether or not medical interventions work and are worthwhile is […]
Inspired and motivated by the Cyclists in the City blog, cyclists and bicycle and pedestrian friendly local politicians have been fighting a road redesign in London. There is nothing unusual about the road design — it is much like the road designs that we have been given for decades, which […]
London Reconnections reports that Heathrow Airtrack — the old proposal to link ready-built platforms under Heathrow T5 to Waterloo via the Windsor lines through Staines and Putney — has been quietly shelved. It was never a very interesting railway and, since I don’t anticipate using any airport in the foreseeable […]
The geology and landscape of the Scottish Highlands are famously divided by the Great Glen fault. Less famous is the Moine Thrust Belt, running almost parallel to the Great Glen a hundred miles north. Here the rocks and landscape of the northern Highlands are pushed over those of the Hebrides […]
I was sitting in a cafe on a major central London road eating breakfast and watching the morning rush go past. The sheer quantity of dangerous and law breaking motorists driving through the central zone inspired a blog post on “business models”, and the force behind bad driving. You can […]
This is another archival repost from the old blog. Wikipedia avoids weasel words. It attributes statements to their sources, rather than to “some people say”. Can you imagine a newspaper surviving five minutes with such a policy? When somebody hoaxes Wikipedia, the article quickly gets investigated and deleted within three […]