Here's a neat widget that should show the ten most played albums in my last.fm profile.

The omens weren't good for this event. In early December I came down with a long-lasting cold that kept me from training for much of the month.  This, coupled with festive season food consumption, resulted in my carrying several kilos over my racing weight.  So it was with some trepidation that I set off for the club room to ride the New Year's day '10'.  The event was held on the F5d/10 Stoke Hammond bypass course.

As usual, I rode down to the club room, where we were meeting and signing on.  Fortunately, the weather was warmer than of late, and was just slightly over freezing. Less fortunately, it was kind of a damp, penetrating cold, that had us all shivering on the line. To add insult to injury, there was a gentle amount of tiny, almost imperceptible, snowflakes. Just before I was due to start, I decided against removing my outer thermal layers. This was all to the good, I think. I had a quick spin up and down the opening leg of the course, which was enough to confirm that was the correct clothing choice.  In all, we had a good turnout for this event - 13 riders.

Yet another palaeontology blog post!  This story roared round the internet just before Christmas (for example the BBC News story), but I found it interesting as a non-specialist in arachnid evolution or palaeontology, partly because of the methods used for extracting fossil arthropod material from the substrate, and partly because it tells a tale of re-examination and reanalysis of specimens with a quite different interpretation. Oh, and there's a tale of the evolution of silk use by spiders!

Production and use of silk is the defining characteristic of spiders - modern advanced spiders use silk for a quite astonishing array of purposes (from taking flight to encasing eggs; from capturing prey to constructing shelters), and a single individual may produce silk of several types with distinct properties.  Spider silk is produced from specialised structures called spigots, which are in turn located on modified appendages called spinnerets (see picture on the right, from the arachnology website, where there's a description of silk production). 

Twenty randomly selected books from my library...

The much reported synchronised locking-up of first generation 30Gb Zune MP3 players appears to have an explanation from Microsoft: it's a poxy Leap Year bug!

I suppose this is only to be expected from a company that enshrined the "1900 is a leap year" flaw in its flagship Office component Excel.

Thisismoney.co.uk announce that Money Mail have awarded their 2008 Wooden Spoon award to British Telecom.  This is from an online customer survey.  One notable quote from the article is:

There were two areas you felt most aggrieved about. The first was dealing with overseas call centres. You complained that you are forced to spend a substantial amount of time pressing buttons in the automated system before you can reach a human being.

In this year of not only the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, but the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, we can expect the major celebratory events to be countered by the usual mediaevally-minded creationist suspects.  The journal Nature has published a useful document with the aim of highlighting an publicising why (the vast majoroty of) scientists regard evolution by natural selection as a fact -  "15 Evolutionary Gems"- the contents are as follows:

Gems from the fossil record
   1 Land-living ancestors of whales
   2 From water to land
   3 The origin of feathers
   4 The evolutionary history of teeth
   5 The origin of the vertebrate skeleton
Gems from habitats
   6 Natural selection in speciation
   7 Natural selection in lizards
   8 A case of co-evolution
   9 Differential dispersal in wild birds
  10 Selective survival in wild guppies
  11 Evolutionary history matters
Gems from molecular processes
  12 Darwin's Galapagos finches
  13 Microevolution meets macroevolution
  14 Toxin resistance in snakes and clams
  15 Variation versus stability 

The Natural History Museum has a packed programme of events to celebrate the big Darwin anniversary in 2009.   I'm not sure why they've chosen the image on the left as par tof the logo - it seems to suggest Darwin is swearing us to secrecy!  (I wonder if it's a photoshopped image...).  In any event, this is a big deal in public understanding of science, and my university, The Open University, is a significant contributor:

The Open University is working with the BBC to co-produce four TV series that consider the impact and legacy of Darwin's theories and ideas in an attempt to engage the public to take their interest in Darwin further. The four series are: Tree of Life (BBC ONE) where Sir David Attenborough argues the case for the importance of the science of evolution; Life (BBC ONE) which will capture the most extraordinary and awe-inspiring animal survival behaviours ever shown on TV; Andrew Marr on Darwin's Legacy (working title, BBC TWO) which will explore the impact of Darwin's theory in science, society, political movement and religion; and A Year in Darwin's Garden (working title, BBC TWO) in which entomologist and farmer, Jimmy Doherty, recreates many of Darwin's ground-breaking experiments with plants.

Change applied 1st January 2009.

Owing to a number of apparently spurious user accounts, I've changed the way new user accounts are set up.  Before you can set up an account, you need to request a passcode from Robert (see "Email me" from the Main Menu for contact details).