A still, clear, and quite chilly morning, with a few wisps of mist greeted the riders who turned out for the North Bucks Hill Climb Championship for 2008.  As usual, held on F5z/H (for the uninitiated, the climb from Bow Brickhill to the golf course on top of the hill).  There were loads of mountain bikers hanging around and starting their ride in the woods, but none could be persuaded to take part.

I have to say at this point that I hate hill climbs.  I like cycling up big long hills, but sprinting up short steep hills seems foolhardy to day the least.  Anyway, my effort in the 2008 championship came to a quick end, as I got stopped on the steepest part of the climb by some twerp in a 4X4 who decided to stop to hold a conversation with someone.  That kind of buggered up my ride, and I lost enthusiasm after that.  Oh well.  

Slide:ology

The art and science of creating great presentations

I came across a link to Excrementum Can. (canine faeces) in a comment left at the excellent quackometer site.  Helios Homeopathy do indeed sell Excrementum Can. at a variety of extreme dilutions (can't be much fun doing those preparations, at least for the early dilutions).  Dilutions offered are 6C - 10M, but while I know that 6C is six 100 fold dilutions, what's 10M?  Is that ten 1000 fold dilutions? [Edit: at this site, it is revealed that 1M = 1000C.  This reaches the heights of absurdity.  10M must therefore be 10000C, or 10000 successive 100-fold dilutions! I am losing track of this level of dilution - perhaps someone less mathmatically challenged that I am first thing in the morning can calculate this...do they really mean 10^-20000?]

More about this quack stuff at provings.info, but it's not terribly obvious what it's supposed to do.  The onward link is in German, with registration required, so I didn't go there.

Cyclingnews.com reports that there is evidence that Frank Schleck was a client of Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, the notorious Spanish sports doctor that offered blood doping services to a seemingly large swathe of the pro peleton (and a bunch of other sports - but that seems to have been swept neatly under the carpet).  Frank Schleck is implicated as "Amigo di Birillo", Birillo being the code name for Ivan Basso.  Basso of course denied involvement until sufficient evidence piled up, then accepted a ban.

The Fuentes case seems to have gone a bit cold, but the bags of blood - each labeled with a puerile codename - are still being held.  It's about time these cheats got identified for once and all by DNA testing.

This year, Team Grumpy made a fifth visit to the Duo Normand time trial, and of course Carol and I were keen to make a holiday of it.  We stayed in a house south of St Lo.  We took our trusty Dawes tandem to explore the surrounding countryside.  In the descriptions below, each day has it's own photo gallery: click on the thumbnail to see the full image; click on the large image to advance to the next in the series.

The report on the Duo Normand itself is in a separate blog entry.

The Duo Normand two-up team time trial is held annually in September on a 54.3km circuit based in the Normandy town of Marigny.  from a British time triallist's point of view, it's a spectacular event - not only because of the numbers of spectators, but because of the large numbers of competitors (in many categories from unlicenced to professional) and the virtually closed roads.  All the teams can have a following car in case of mechanical problems, though Team Grumpy have never availed themselves of this in the 5 occasions we've ridden it.

The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century

Peter Pringle

Over at the Quackometer blog, a report that a quack's legal action against the Guardian over an article by Ben Goldacre has failed.  Goldacre himself writes about it in the Bad Science blog (and presumably in today's Guardian).

This libel action has cost the quack, Matthias Rath, £500k for the Guardian's legal bills, and probably the same again for his own costs.  Whether it will silence him and his business, I don't know.

Visually Mediated Motor Planning in the Escape Response of Drosophila

Gwyneth Card and Michael H. Dickinson

Current Biology 10.1016/j.cub.2008.07.094
[Summary] [Full Text] [PDF] [Supplemental Data]

 

Here's a smashing paper - a deeply detailed analysis of the Drosophila escape response.  What's more, it's hard to see the usual justifications we need to use in grant applications.   And a paper about "looming threats...

Ben Goldacre will be familiar to Guardian readers and those (like me) who regularly check up his Bad Science blog.  This book shares much of the subject matter Goldacre covers in his blog: bad science journalism, dodgy medical research, quack medicine and the like.  Goldacre really considers bad science as it applies to medicine and medical research.

Since I've not finished this book yet, this is not so much a review as a heads-up that it's out, available from Amazon (click the image), and that from the chapters I've read, it's a very readable counterblast to dodgy science.  Chapters cover topics such as dodgy health "experts" such as Gillian McKeith and Patrick Holford; media and MMR (and other health scares); CAM "treatments", and much more.