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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Here’s a thing I wrote in July 2009, back when British alternative medicine was simultaneously trying to silence critics in court and complaining that there was a powerful conspiracy against it. It disappeared in blog reorganisations and possibly was just about amusing enough to deserve saving… So I was rummaging […]
A couple of weeks ago Oliver Wright of The Independent ran a hatchet job, both horrible and nonsensical, about the head of the RCGP, Clare Gerada — the tireless and currently ubiquitous critic of the NHS privatisation Health and Social Care Bill. You may remember Ben Goldacre wrote about Oliver […]
I originally wrote this in Feb 2008, and later updated it for the old Lay Science. While making sure that this website was up-to-date, it occurred to me that this post would have disappeared with the rest of the Lay Science site. I have forgotten what updates I made when […]
Shortly before parliament rose for the summer, an unusually large audience tuned in to the entertaining spectacle of Prime-Minister’s Question Time in a week when a scandal-rag had sunk in its own great scandal. I don’t suppose anybody noticed the interruption of David Ward, the hon. member for Bradford East. […]
I stumbled upon an article in The Lancet, volume 138, issue 3554, of the 10th October 1891, which it seems has been overlooked by the internet so far. It celebrates the rise of the bicycle, but warns against its abuse — addiction, even. It has a message that James Cracknell […]
The Cycling Embassy has a manifesto and a set of demands. But it needs something shiny, a pretty picture to grab the attention of the people who need to read that manifesto and meet those demands. We’re looking for poster and postcard design ideas. Something that sums up the problem […]
This week, the Department for Communities and Local Government put out a press release about town centre parking. Unlike last time, they didn’t even have to announce that Pickles is ending The War On The Motorist™. On that point, their work was done for them, by 36 newspapers and the […]
In 2000, London’s previous mayor, Ken Livingstone, began the process of fixing forty years of mistakes that had been made in the pursuit of the impossible — the comfortable accommodation of mass motor vehicle use in a dense city centre. He recognised that cities are supposed to be places for […]
We know that Boris Johnson’s fantasy of “smoothing traffic flow” will act as an incentive for people to get into their cars and, even more so, for businesses to move more stuff around. In a city like London there is much more potential demand for road space than could ever […]
In a post about designing ever increasing amounts of truck and van dependence into business models, I mentioned that an “Edgar’s Cool Water” had followed me on twitter and had justified their business with the argument that some people in London and the South East need water deliveries because their […]
This is another archival report, originally written for the old blog in 2008. Here’s an interesting one: Genesis chapter 30. If you think Darwin got inheritance wrong, try the Bible. 30:28 And he [Laban] said, Appoint me thy wages, and I will give it. 30:29 And he said unto him, […]
As in so many of the things that the Europeans do better than us, the model by which our railways came about is shared with the Americans rather than our continent. When the railways arrived in the middle of the 19th century, most European governments saw the need for their […]