I was at a thing with some people who thought that the Hierarchy of Provision was a good idea. Have campaigned for it, and had their campaign organisations push it.I’ve explained before why I think it’s worse than useless.In attempting to defend i…
Xin Shen, Hui-fen Zhu, Feng-rong He, Wei Xing, Li Li, Jing Liu, Juan Yang, Xing-fei Pan, Ping Lei, Zhi-hua Wang, and Guan-xin ShenAn anti-transferrin receptor antibody enhanced the growth inhibitory effects of chemotherapeutic drugs on human non-h…
Popped into town to see @mgtmccartney talk at Conway Hall about some of the reasons behind the paradox that screening a population for disease, if not properly thought through, can do more harm than good.I just wanted to make a note of one of the …
Some brief half-thought-through notes on Paul Davies’s delightful article in CiF today on cancer evolution. Davies describes his theory that the evolution of cancer is kinda the evolution of life in reverse: that cancer cells pick up the functiona…
yet another “a helmet saved my life, i know that for a fact because it was smashed” comment reminded me of something, but i don’t have time to write properly about it, so here are the quick thoughts. a couple of years ago i was knocked over by a m…
Some amazing numbers about the response to deaths/injuries on London’s roads buried in a Robert Davis post caught my eye: Prosecutions: 7/216 deaths; 227/811 ???Serious/Life Changing??? (???Serious / Life Changing??? is an unofficial category Something li…
I was writing about the casual way we accept dangerous roads and streets, using a few case studies where deaths resulting from appalling careless and incompetent driving on badly designed roads have been dismissed as “accidents” — not just someth…
Just banking a quote for future reference on the idea that we are “cyclists” or “motorists” or “pedestrians” — groups competing with one another. It’s from the Understanding Walking and Cycling report, of course, and still a source of upset for a…
It’s a nice day outside, I’m not sure why I’m flicking through the Blueprint for a Green Economy paper prepared by the party’s Quality of Life Policy Group. Just one of the competing views within the party, obviously. We believe that a Conservativ…
the other thing that caught my eye in Attitudes to cycling was the behaviour change section. These behaviour change models have always struck me as pretty wishy washy stuff that contribute little to our understanding of the problem or its solution…
scrolling through the TfL Attitudes to cycling report while citing some numbers, I spotted these ones, unrelated to what I was writing about, which hadn’t caught my eye before… Cycle training increased the confidence of 76% of attendees. The tra…
regarding my last note: a variety of additional ways of visualising the issue of modal split and short journeys.
This is what I was actually after from NTS, for use in the context of barriers to cycling and excuses for why cycling is impractical and mass cycling impossible. I couldn’t find an existing graph to show what I wanted to show, so here is one. Cons…
This caught my eye when I was citing some unrelated stats about travel distances in the NTS (PDF). I must have seen it before, but perhaps just skipped over it and didn’t notice what it was saying. Or perhaps others have already commented on it an…
This is something I wrote years and years ago, but which slipped through the great blog reorganisation a couple of years ago, back when I thought I’d be able to find the time for a whole blog about cancer biology. So I’ll dump it here for safe keeping… This post […]
I flicked through the Cycling Cities and Towns evaluation report that the DfT released yesterday. Not all that interesting, entirely unsurprising, little if anything that hasn’t been said before. Indeed, I think bits and pieces were probably alrea…
This exchange in the same 1963 Buchanan Report debate made me giggle. I guess jokes about Tory shire county MPs write themselves. Mr Simon Digby (Conservative, West Dorset)The Report expresses the idea that there is something very unsightly in pri…
Continuing my filing — the long list of pages bookmarked for future reading and tagging. The 1963 Buchanan Report, Traffic in Towns, is generally treated as an object of derision these days. Architects and urban designers (and bloggers) display i…
Tidying up my bookmarks and clippings, I thought this one, from 23 June 1937 — 75 years ago — might be of wider interest/amusement to those observing TfL’s, uh, unique state-of-the-art solutions to the junctions problem. Oral Answers to Question…
Joe Moran’s On Roads quotes Fred Inglis’s 1975 essay “Roads, office blocks and the new misery”, presumably (but not necessarily) referring to construction of the M32, which destroyed, amongst other things, the St Annes neighbourhood of Bristol. It…
This paper looks nice. Like so much research it’s not exactly “news” in the way that news outlets would like science stories to be. Research supporting what was already suspected. The most important specific example of a broader principle that was…
Just clipping this comment for the scrapbook. Not really news, but some good detail to look up later. The point of Cycling England was to have expert oversight of the spending, rather than just giving the money to local authorities to launder into…
don’t think I bothered looking at the most recent of TfL’s annual Attitudes Towards Cycling report when it came out. They tend to say much the same thing each time: only a small portion of the population, disproportionately male, disproportionatel…
crappy posterous ignored this one first time…———- Forwarded message ———-In genetics, “Mitochondrial Eve” is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of living humans. She’s not the “first” or “oldest” female. Obviously she had anc…
has posterous stopped working again? why did i pick this platform?