I live and time trial in the London North District, where the flagship course over many years has been the F1, which uses the A1 dual carriageway (formerly the Great North Road). The Great North Road has been significant in the history of English time trialling over the years. Nowadays, events on the A1 in this area are restricted to the stretch of road between the Black Cat roundabout and the Baldock interchange, where the A1 becomes the A1(M) and beyond which bicycles aren't permitted. When I first moved down here, things were different, with time trials reaching thr Alconbury interchange - over the years, I've ridden a variety of course permutations - the majority of which are based on a start point near Tempsford (and usually using the Stuart Memorial Hall in Tempsford.I'd been aware of the F. T. Bidlake memorial near Sandy for some time, but until today hadn't actually visited. There's a brief biography of Frederick Thomas Bidlake (1867-1933) at wikipedia - put briefly, his role in English time trialling was significant.In the 1890s, cycle racing on roads was threatened following an incident between a couple of racing cyclists (Bidlake and a friend, pluse their pacers) and a lady with a horse which, startled by the cyclists, reared causing the cyclists to wind up in the ditch. Despite the fact that most damage was caused to the cyclists, complaints to the polices about cyclists' behaviour led to concerns that cycle riding on roads might be banned - at the time there was some pressure to amend to Highways Act. To forestall this, the National Cyclists Union banned racing on the road and insisted competitive cycling should only take place on tracks (known as 'paths' in those days).Not everyone agreed with the NCU's decision, and a rival organisation was set up - the Road Racing Council - and Bidlake organised a road race on 5th October 1895 which essentially used the time trial formula used to this day. Though it's not true to say Bidlake invented time trialling, he was one of those who codified the sport.Bidlake worked in a number of sports, including the Scheider Trophy for seaplanes in which he was timekeeper. Ultimately, Bidlake died three weeks after a fall on Barnet Hill due to collision with a car. The memorial was erected in 1934 after a public subscription. It's quite a modest affair, with a box hedge enclosing a triangular plot near the A1 at Sandy. Here's a Google Maps link that shows where it is.[caption id="attachment_4097" align="alignnone" width="1000"] The Bidlake memorial garden - in a rather inaccessible location[/caption]There's a stone pedestal that looks to have had something cut off - from the Wikipedia page, I think it formerly supported a sundial - with a legend "He measured time".[caption id="attachment_4096" align="aligncenter" width="563"] The pedestal that formerly held a sundial[/caption]Above a bench, there's a plaque inscribed

THIS GARDEN IS DEDICATED TOFREDERICK THOMAS BIDLAKEA GREAT CYCLISTA MAN OF SINGULAR CHARM & CHARACTERAN UNTIRING WORKER FOR CYCLISTS1867-1933

The bench itself is a commemoration of Bidlake's colleague George Herbert Stancer, and indeed Stancer's ashes were scattered in the the memorial.

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.

The BBC reports that Stalin has been voted into third place in a poll for the greatest Russian, held by a Russian TV station.

Never mind that he was born in Gori in Georgia! (You may recall Gori from the Russian military action in 2008).  Anyway, the result is a little astonishing, given his three decade reign of terror in which millions of Soviet citizens died.  His claim to greatness (other than being a hugely important figure in the 20th century) is presumably his reputation as the person who led the Soviet Union to victory over Nazi Germany.  As the BBC says:

 Here's a demo film from 1968 showing one of the first computer mice...I love the peculiar combined keyboard/mouse pad that resembles an airline meal tray.

[video:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1MPJZ6M52dI&feature=related 425x344] 

Here's an cool page showing academic pedigrees of Drosophila workers: FlyTree.

 It's interesting to see how few steps it takes to get back as far as T. H. Morgan!  For example, here's where I fit in the grand scheme: Robert in FlyTree.

I am not a historian (as should be evident from these web pages), but I am fond of reading books on historical topics.  A few years ago, I read Orlando Figes' book on the Russian Revolution, A Peoples' Tragedy, whiach ably describes the events leading up to the revolution and its immediate aftermath.  The Whisperers, published in 2007, concerns Soviet citizens' private lives during the Stalin years.  The work results from a wide ranging research project (more details from the author's website) utilising Russian and Soviet public and private archives. Eight chapters cover the years from  the revolution to the death of Stalin, with a ninth covering the years 1953-2006.

In the first chapter, I felt as though I was setting up to read a book of lists: listsof people, lists of their privations, lists of instances of misused power.  However, as I mad my way through the book, I found the stories of families and individual being told progressed very clearly and accessibly.  The book doesn't deal with Stalin's personality and motives, but does occasionally deal with individuals with quite close association with Stalin.  What struck me as I read the book was firstly the privations that those not Party members had to endure, both in terms of their accommodation conditions but economically, and how they could cope with this in the belief that the Party was a force for good.  Intriguingly, people often chose to believe theit nearest and dearest must have been guilty when they fell victim to the apparently randomly applied purges.  

Overall, the book presents an important story, in an interesting and acccessible format.  This material is relevant in an era where our own personal freedoms are continually limited and eroded in the supposed war on terror.  Our government aims to be able to lock our citizens up on suspicion, and without charge for up to 42 days, riding roughshod over hard won civil rights and liberties.In the modern IT era, we see increased data collection by central government, and even private companies have the ability to pry into our web-sufing habits (see my articles on this site on BT and Phorm).  Yesterday,the Swedish Parliament voted for routine tapping of cross-border interception of communication.  One wonders how the Soviet system managed to so effectively monitor and thereby repress the population in a pre-electronic era, and quite how the impact of IT on surveillance will ultimately impact on our western democratic societies.