I tried out generative AI, and it seems quite capable of doing away with South Gloucestershire. And think tanks. I don’t think I have an easily pigeonholeable position on generative AI. My priors (affection for genuine creative works and belief in rewarding creators, being jaded with content in the attention […]
I’ve been trying out Sengi — perhaps the closest a Mastodon interface gets to what I’ve been looking for. I didn’t want to say that it’s the closest I’ve found to a Tweetdeck mimic — because I’m trying not to just reproduce how I was consuming social media through Tweetdeck. […]
The death of twitter and the migration to Mastodon is a good thing — as long as we don’t make it Mastodon’s Eternal September. There was a time in the early internet when it was available only inside large organisations — universities especially. Users of Usenet — the original (or […]
The transport and streetscape proposals coming from Bristol’s councils and councillors reveal their priorities and choices. So why are they so reluctant to take ownership of them? Bristol is once again making the news for the poor quality of the cycling and walking infrastructure that it’s building and proposing. First […]
While urban campaigners cry “save the trees” to halt re-development of city centre car parks, volume housebuilders are covering fields and woods on the far side of the greenbelt with little boxes for commuters to meet housing demand.
Of all the depressing, startling, and often eccentric soundbites that scrolled past during budget day afternoon, the one that really stood out for me was the chancellor boasting that he is spending £2 million to create a Beatles museum in Liverpool. Boomers warping the national demographics is a helluva drug […]
Before SARS-CoV-2, there were already several coronaviruses that infected humans. They circulated in the population giving us colds. What’s so different about the novel coronavirus that makes it cause potentially deadly Covid-19 instead of a cold? There are a few hypotheses being explored, but the frontrunner is the idea that […]
As active travel and liveable city campaigners, it’s tempting to portray our own city as falling behind while others forge ahead with brave and progressive plans, as a tactic to nudge our own leaders into similar action. But we should be careful not to fall for our own myths, hype […]
No construction or utilities crew in Bristol cares about pedestrians, cyclists or disabled street users, and the council are making no effort to change the situation.
Why is there an advertising van, promoting patios and driveways, abandoned on the Cumberland Basin road system? How long has it been there? It has the look of something that has been abandoned there for a long time with nobody doing anything about it. Is it supposed to be there? […]
South Gloucestershire are proposing road building to solve climate change. It’s what council highways departments do.
At the end of March last year I needed a new chain and cassette, so one morning I took my bicycle to Bools at the opposite end of Fishponds Road to us. It was a week or two into first lockdown, when all our (social) media, conversations and heads were […]
Was saving these notes in my files but the story was entertaining enough that it reminded me I have a public notebook I should use for more of my notes. (And then I put some effort into making my notes comprehensible to others and it reminded that I shouldn’t waste […]
In the sick room at my office, I’ve only just noticed these amazing instructions for how to call an ambulance. I can’t even count how many words there are in there. I offer this to the world as a perfect example of how not to convey information. Write in dry, […]
In Cycling in Middle England, Mark mentioned that the transport minister responded to a question about policy outside of major cities by waffling about remote places where distances are impractical for cycling. If we’re not living in big cities, apparently we’re living in remote places. Except of course, by definition, nobody lives there. […]
I’ve not been keeping up with the consultations so much, but I found 5 minutes over lunch to glance at this https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/cycling/tower-rothsay-webb and scribble the first things that came to mind… Andrew Gilligan said that things would be "done properly, or not at all." Unfortunately, while some aspects of this […]
In case they are any use to anybody else responding to TfL’s Stockwell Cross consultation: some hastily bashed out and poorly edited down thoughts I gave them. There are lots and lots of problems you could pull out of the details — positioning of lanes on bends, dangerous lane merges, up […]
Part of my job includes looking after social media. That means I can’t hide from the torrent of advice from Social Media Experts. It seems one of the standard lines is still “use bitly on twitter”. I’ve developed an excessive perhaps slightly irrational rage with that one.* It came up again at the […]
Artists, agents and galleries in New York and Hong Kong: looking to pay some PR agency lots of money to promote your next event? Perhaps piss away your money on some clowns who will spray spam at random irrelevant email addresses, harvested off the internet, of people who live thousands […]
A year ago I flagged something in feedly for a brief sarcastic comment, and never got around to it. Now that I’m having a clear out… “It is alarming that a fifth of people killed or seriously injured on our roads in 2011 were involved in a collision where at […]
Flicking through a 10 year old notebook, one of those ones made from paper and everything, deciding whether to keep these things cluttering up the place or not. Friday 16 January 2004: Martin Birch reports that he met Bill one day in the department of zoology, and apologised for forgetting […]
After suggesting to twitter that somebody who hangs out on a forum called “Bicycle Driving” might be beyond parody, I stumbled upon John Forester’s recent speech given to a Dutch conference — written up as a pseudo-academic “paper” and posted as a PDF (if ever you needed proof that this […]
Way back when I worked in academic publishing, assessing newly submitted papers and finding suitable people to peer review them, I encountered hundreds of weird and wonderful names every day. And kept a list of which most amused. Which never got published because, well, it would be mean. But… the […]
A quick note on something that keeps popping up and bugging me — a factoid that has been passed through Chinese whispers to become something entirely different, and entirely incorrect. Triggered on this particular occasion by reading The Ranty Highwayman’s account of a talk by Phillip Darnton: He went on […]
The road haulage lobby briefly grabbed a bit of attention last month when they blamed the victims killed by their industry: http://beyondthekerb.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/cyclists-go-truck-yourselves/ But really, the history of their practices is worth looking at. Mick Hamer (yes, this Mick Hamer) in Wheels Within Wheels reviews how the road freight industry has […]