The latest issue of Genetics to flop onto my desk has a rather nice article by Sydney Brenner entitled "In the Beginning Was the Worm...". This brief article (in the regularly excellent Perspectives section) presents an account of the origins of Caenorhabditis elegans research, by the beast's main man, research which ultimately earned him Nobel Prize fame. I won't go into a blow-by-blow account of Brenner's career (that's probably quite easy to track down on the interweb), but suffice it to say that after forging a seriously important career in prokaryotic genetics and molecular biology, he was instrumental in establishing an entirely novel experimental system.  For a Drosophilist such as myself, C. elegans seems particularly simple - it has a defined number of cells per animal (dependent on sex), and the cell lineage tuns out to be pretty much invariant in the wild type.  In origin, it's a soil dwelling nematode. For my part, the big influence was the genome mapping and sequencing technologies that were developed for C.elegans, and which we applied to Drosophila.  The picture below shows an adult (and, dare I say it, elegant) C. elegans.

This was the hottest evening event so far - it was humid and temperatures reaching towards 30 centigrade made it tough for me (though, it has to be said, not for some other riders).  My roar up V10 to reach Stony was a good warmup, and after noticing several new riders (this was a "Come and Try it" event) and explaining how time trialling works, I started in the #17 spot.

Actually, to start with, I was feeling pretty good, but pretty rapidly I found my pulse rate soaring, furst up into level 2 (so far, so good), but then onwards into level 4.  The opening mile or so seemd good, and I felt quicj, but I just lost it climbing towards Nash - I tried to keep the gearing down, but this just led to slower speeds!  After turning, the bigh descent from Nash to Beachampton was harder than usual, as I failed to get the speed up (and was seeing very high pulse rates - on a descent!).

For some reason this sketch popped into my head yesterday evening after seeing a commercial for a Roxy Music compilation CD.  It's from an unfortunately quite short-lived comedy sketch show called Big Train, and begins with Chairman Mao on his deathbed:

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNBOknvbPL8 425x344] 

As reported in the BBC this week (Science and tech committee reborn), once again the UK Parliament has a committee to oversee science.  In recent ministerial revamps, the Department for Innovation Universities and Skills (DIUS) was merged with BERR to form a new super-ministry - Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) - for Lord Mandelson, who seems to have emerged from the political wilderness to which he was consigned after a scandal too far a few years ago.  Interestingly, this means there's no Government department with Education or Science in its title.

Lord Drayson, Minister for Science and Innovation is quoted as saying:

Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here was one of the first albums I bought (a late starter, I didn't start buying LPs until I went to University in 1977).  It's long since disappeared from my vinyl collection - probably as a result of a burglary a couple of decades ago.  Of course pretty soon after I started buying LPs, bands like Pink Floyd were excoriated as rock dinosaurs during punk rock's year zero...

Probably it's a function of my age, but I've started paying a bit more attention to some of this old stuff recently, and just the other day I downloaded a copy of Wish You Were Here from Amazon.  And what do I think of it over three decades after I first listened to it?

Installing Internet Exploiter 8* on a laptop that dual boots Linix and WinXP...it's checking for malicious software**...will it spot Windows?

*Need this to check development websites.

I've blogged before on the Great Australian Firewall - this being the plans of the Australian Government to take concepts of child protection to the extent of internet filtering to levels seen in (for example) China.  The whole process got rather murky with the release of the details of banned sites via Wikileaks.

Now, The Register reports (Great Australian Firewall to censor online games) that as one might predict the repertoire of websites deemed unsuitable will include those offering games rated as suitable for over-15s (because Australia doesn't have a game certificate for 18+). Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia is quotes as saying:

Well, this event marked my return to racing after a 4 week layoff (away for cycle touring - see elsewhere in this blog, then last week's event got called off).  It did feel a little strange.

The evening was really quite nice, probably a little over 20 degrees, and sunny, though rather windier than the BBC's predicted 14mph easterly, I reckon.  Still, it made for a fast opening leg to Chicheley.  In fact it was pretty fast almost to North Crawley.  As usual, I lost focus a bit during the drags after North Crawley, but even so I was surprised when Tony P. came past at about 18 minutes.  Still, he didn't get far away from me, finishing in around 22:37 to my 23:40.

OK, so installing the FCKeditor (see part 1) was quite fiddly.  I've now installed a couple more add-on modules, and they were pretty easy to do.

Taxonomy Menu - I'm hoping to be able to list key words for research topics as a menu or tag cloud.  Not had time to play with this.

Well, I now have an embryonic website.  And I've got to grips with the document structure (actually, it makes a lot of sense to me).  User access permissions seem to be more configurable than the default state in Joomla.

Unfortunately my Ubuntu laptop threw a wobbly this morning while I was editing menus, and that had the effect of damaging the database.  Had a bit of trouble repairing the damage, but all seems to be well now.