I just read on The Register that British Telecom will begin their third trial of the despicable Phorm data pimping service.  For reasons why this is so appalling, visit the nodpi and badphorm websites.

Alex Hanff over at nodpi reckons that the opt in/out system it seems that the BT data pimps will use still falls foul of legal requirements.  For my part, I believe that the whole system is vile, immoral and underhand.  There are a variety of aspects to the antics that the BT Data Pimps have conducted over the last few year that leave a particularly sour taste.

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.

It seems like it was only yesterday that I started a new season, and here we are with the last time trial of the North Bucks club event season (we have a couple of hill climbs, and the Norlond '25' on 7th September is the nominated event for the club '25' championship still to come).  In actual fact I have one remaining season goal - the Duo Normand on the 21st September (see my preview blog article).  This event was the eighth counting event in the 2008 NBRC League - the final table is available at the North Bucks Road Club website (pdf file).

I got a bit wet in some relatively light rain (in comparison to the overnight rain that we'd had), and another bout of rain caused some to wonder whether the event would go ahead.  But go ahead it did. I had a distinct lack of energy, probably due to a mild tummy upset over the previous 36 hours.  I was also a bit cross about the JCB parked across the road just before the climb to North Crawle, and the slow moving traffic through North Crawley.

This was the second time trial this weekend, and the overnight weather really did not augur well for a fun time out there on the F1/25 (which for those who don't know, is on the A1 between Sandy and Buckden).  In fact I was woken at 5am by the stonkingly heavy rain.  However, by the time Richard came to pick me up, shortly after 7am, the rain had stopped, and it stayed off for the duration of the race.  Otherwise, the weather was a little disruptive, with a stiff breeze that was mostly a crosswind. 

I still felt a bit weak from the tummy upset, and I found it very hard to get my heart rate up to the sort of level I would expect for a 25 mile time trial.  In fact I spent most of the event in level 2.  It was a bit of a lonely event for me - there were only a handful of riders starting behind me, and I only caught one rider.  I was caught by Ken Platts for 4 minutes near the St Neots (A428) exit on the southbound leg, which bucked my ideas up a bit - my concentration had been wavering quite a bit up to that point.  Traffic was fine this morning, thought here had been a two-car crash northbound to Buckden that had the road reduced to one lane when I passed through (some riders encountered a complete carriageway closure and had to zoom up the hard shoulder).

A. Bhutkar, S. W. Schaeffer, S. M. Russo, M. Xu, T. F. Smith, W. M. Gelbart (2008). Chromosomal Rearrangement Inferred From Comparisons of 12 Drosophila Genomes Genetics, 179 (3), 1657-1680 DOI: 10.1534/genetics.107.086108

Calvin Bridges is, with Alfred Sturtevant, one of my heroes of Drosophila genetics.  Among his achievements were the demonstration and confirmation of the chromsome theory of inheritance, and the establishment of the polytene chromosome maps (for more about polytene chromosomes, see this article).  Bridges was one of the early members of the Morgan fly lab, and stayed there for his entire (though unfortunately short) career.  Kohler, in his excellent history of Drosophila genetics, characterises Bridges as the "blue collar" member of the lab, the worker who would invest huge energy in the technical development of Drosophila genetics.

A. Bhutkar, S. W. Schaeffer, S. M. Russo, M. Xu, T. F. Smith, W. M. Gelbart (2008). Chromosomal Rearrangement Inferred From Comparisons of 12 Drosophila Genomes Genetics, 179 (3), 1657-1680 DOI: 10.1534/genetics.107.086108

Back when I was a carefree postdoc, one of the projects I worked on was the assembly of a molecular physical map of the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Of course, Drosophila researchers had for years been using a physical map, the polytene chromosome map, and indeed we used this as the framework on which we assembled our molecular map using cosmid clones. These papers take the genome sequences of 11 Drosophila species (plus the sequence of Drosophila melanogaster, determined back in 2000), fit them to the polytene chromosome maps, and examine chromosome rearrangments seen in inter-species comparisons.  It seems to me there isn't anything hugely sexy in this work, but there is a huge amount of work that sets the evolutionary relationships between these Drosopholids in context.  It's also an opportunity to expound on chromosomes in Drosophila!

Bad Blood: The Secret Life of the Tour De France

Jeremy Whittle

I was intrigued by a brief news piece in the latest issue of Science to fall onto my desk (the 22nd August issue).  This concerns the recently published genome sequence of Trichoplax adhaerens, a peculiar animal in a phylum I'd never heard of.  That in itself was interesting, particularly as placozoans have a really odd body plan that involves a mere four cell types.  Wikipedia has a nice description of Placozoa, from which the image below comes.

On browsing the web a bit further, I found this movie (Quicktime format) of a placozoan moving.  I presume this would be Trichoplax adhaerens, as this is the only known species in the phylum - a second described species, T. reptans, was apparently described at the end of the 19th century but hasn't ben seen again and it's existence is doubtful.

This event was held on a new course (I understand that it had been used before as the basis for a 25 mile event), and uses the new A428 dual carriageway section from Hardwick to turn at the Caxton Gibbet roundabout where it crosses the A1198.  The event HQ was in the excellent Comberton village hall, about 5 miles from the start.  For this event, the weather was perhaps the warmest i've had all season for a time trial: cloudy skies in the morning had cleared away to brilliant sunshine, and we were experiencing temperatures of around 28 degrees!  There is of course a serious downside for every positive - the wind had beens trengthening all day, and by the time we started it was pretty strong.  Being a new dual carriageway, the course is very exposed, since the trees planted alongside hadn't grown yet.  I whizzed out to the turn doing 32mph a lot of the time, but on turning, had a real struggle to the finish.  The return leg is also the longer leg.

Th course has a lot of potential - the road is new, so the surface is pristine, there wasn't actually too much traffic and the turn seemed straightforward when I reached it.  On a day with rather more moderate wind (or ideally no wind!), this should be really fast.

Here are photos from various time trials. 

For copyright attribution, see notes below the thumbnails.

{gallery}timetrials{/gallery}