This morning I rode over to Tempsford to help out at the North Middx & Herts '100' - the organiser having emailed a plea for assistance.  Being a kindly soul (and having been in the position of desperately hunting for marshals and other helpers for an Association event in the past), I immediately accepted, but requested a role late in the event as I was planning to cycle over.  In the end I was asked to help the timekeeper by noting riders' numbers as they passed the finish point.

This was a novel version of the F1/100, apparently necessary because a triathlon was being held on the roads normally used for the event.  Essentially, the course used this morning had the riders doing Tempsford to Buckden three times (this being on the A1), then exiting at the Black Cat roundabout to do two laps of a finishing circuit on the A421.

A few weeks ago Tony persuaded me to enter the API/Metrow '25' on the E2/25 near Newmarket.  I bunged off an entry and unfortunately ended up in the opposite end of the start sheet from Tony, which would have meant a fair bit of hanging around for both of us.  On the day, it was really quite blustery, with a what we expected to be a strong headwind out to the turn.

We set off in good time, arriving in Newmarket with well over an hour to go before Tony's start time.   Here, our problems began.  Trying to follow the directions to the race HQ given on the start sheet proved completely impossible.  There was a total absence of riders milling about (usually a sure guide to where a race HQ is), which didn't help.  After cruising around Newmarket for a bit, Tony only had about 20 minutes to go before his scheduled start, so we drove off to the start to see what was there.  Lo and behold, some people on the start line, and down a nearby lane, some cars with riders warming up on turbos.  We stopped to ask these riders where the HQ was - turned out the start sheet was woefully inadequate.

Well, switching hosting company was pretty straightforward, though I'm not sure how quickly the "real" domain name will be active.  For the time being, the site's reachable at http://www.rsaunder.myzen.co.uk.

My new hosting company uses cpanel to administer the account, which appears to be an improvement over the previous setup.   The pages seem a bit quicker to open, though it remains to be seen whether I get 500 internal server errors.

Well, I have taken the decision to switch to a new web hosting company.  The repeated "500 internal server error" events (which included about 12h solid early this week), coupled with totally inadequate response for the "technicians" at my current hosting company have swung my decision to act.  By totally inadequate, I mean that I received a prompt "cut and paste" response on 13th July, and not a whisper since.

I'll migrate the site as soon as I can make a backup of the database and files.  Unfortunately, this probably means the site will be moribund for a few days.  This affects both the main Flies & Bikes site and the Wonderful Life blog.

It was rather wet when I set off from this house in the morning, and while the weather dried up, the rather strong wind did not moderate appreciably.  A modest field of 13 riders was possibly due to it being holiday season.  The strong wind was blowing almost directly in our faces at the start, and so made it hard on the ride up to the dual carriageway section - at times I was well below 20 mph, though having the rider in front getting closer was a bit of a carrot.  Once up on the dual carriageway, the bike was a bit twitchy at times to the turn (I was riding the Hed trispokes). 

As usual the lovely smooth surface on the new road made things easier, and in particular, the return leg was pretty quick, and I finished with 23:31, which must be one of my better times on this course.

Apologies for the intermittent service over the last 24 hours.  I appear to be having database issues, which I'm trying to rectify.  I'd expect access to the site to be a bit flaky for the next day or so until I can get this fixed.

This video on how to unpeel a banana the correct way (the method used by monkeys) has popped up on a number of atheist-inclined websites (for the explanation, see PZ Myers' blog at Pharyngula).  I can confirm that the method works, even when steering a tandem.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBJV56WUDng 425x344]

One of the issues that face those of us with research interests in the biology of ageing is the selection of a model system - and how well that model reflects the biology of ageing in humans.  The two main invertebrate models (the fruit fly Drosophila and the nematode worm C. elegans) have major advantages in their powerful genetics and short lifespan, but of course do differ from vertebrates in significant aspects of their biology.  The difficulty in studying primates lies in no small part in the length of lifepan - in the case of Rhesus macaques studied here, average lifespan is 27 years, so conducting a complete experiment in this system is likely to be a career-long endeavour.

One of the much investigated interventions known to extend lifespan is caloric restriction - this has been shown to be effective in several systems.  This paper reports the results (20 years in) of a research project started in 1989 to investigate the impact of caloric restriction on the

The weather broke a few days before this event - this came as something of a relief for me, as I find the hot and humid conditions we've had recently as something of a trial.  I got a little damp riding down to work (I usually ride to club events directly from work), but the temperature was nice at around 13 degrees C, with only a gentle wind. 

This club event is the North Bucks time trial championship.  Last year I had trouble with the seat pin slipping on my Planet X frame - this year I rode the steel-framed Cougar, with its guaranteed "no-slip" aero carbon seat pin.  In fact, it's more than "no-slip", it's usually "no-budge", at least when servicing the bike.  As it turned out this was the least of my troubles.

The BBC reports (Google to launch operating system) that Google will release an operating system aimed at netbooks in 2010. I particularly like the HAL9000-like logo (see picture). There's a collection of media comments on this development, mostly commenting on the threat to Windows.

Of course, netbooks kicked off with a focus on Linux as their OS, until MS realised they'd committed a strategic blunder and moved to "suggest" to the PC manufacturers that they ought to use Windows XP, which miraculously had its lifetime extended (though this may have been in part due to the poor reception of Vista and its capacity to gobble up computer resources). So forgive me for being a little sceptical that the Chrome OS will unseat Windows in the netbook market (but I would be delighted to be proven wrong - we certainly need a more competitive OS marketplace).

In a brief article in The Guardian (Consumers will see benefits - The case for Phorm), Guy Phillipson and Nick Stringer the chief executive and head of regulatory affairs respectively at the Internet Advertising Bureau attempt to make the case for Phorm.  Of course, they are (in my opinion) slightly economical with the truth in that the objections of the "Privacy Pirates"* over at nodpi.org lies not with targeted advertising, but with the probably illegal interception of internet traffic via deep packet inspection.  The objections focus largely on privacy issues, on copyright issues (making copies of web pages without authorisation), and on legality (e.g. interception of communication).

It would seem that the EU share the objectors' concerns having repeatedly requested the UK Government to respond to their concerns about internet privacy.  Unfortunately HMG won't release their response to Commisioner Reding.  Messrs Phillipson and Stringer believe that Phorm have signed up to the AIB's principles of good practice.  But how sure can the consumer be where Phorm is concerned, given its past identity as 121media?

According to The Times (Phorm stranded as BT and Carphone pull plug on online 'spying' technology), Carphone Warehouse, who's TalkTalk subsidiary were one of the ISPs lining up to use Phorm's invasive DPI technology, have now decided to fall into line an announce they would likewise not implement it.  BT's role as the market leader is evident:

After BT's move, Charles Dunstone, head of Carphone Warehouse, said: "We were only going to do it if BT did it and if the whole industry was doing it. We were not interested enough to do it on our own."

As part of its authoritarian stance on everything the public do, the UK Government has set its sights on controlling ingress and egress across our borders, via the notorious 53 Questions that travellers will need to supply answers to before being allowed to travel.  This whole e-Borders shenanigans is projected to cost the UK Border Agency £1.3bn over the next 10 years.  And with the responsibility for collecting the data falling on the transport companies (ferry companies and airlines for example), it it likely that the traveller will have to cough up for the system, at least in part.  And of course, there is th issue that this applies to travel from the UK mainland to the Isle of Wight, making passports a requirement for internal travel.

Here's a list of the 53 pieces of information they will demand from us (courtesy of the Daily Mail)

The Guardian reports (BT drops Phorm targeted ad service after customers cry foul over privacy) that BT have decided not to implement the vile DPI system for targeting adverts that has been devised by the former spyware company Phorm.  

The company, which has received complaints from customers about Phorm, said the decision was down to its need to conserve resources as it looks to invest £1.5bn in putting a next-generation super-fast broadband network within reach of 10 million homes by 2012. Privately, however, BT bosses have been increasingly concerned about consumer resistance to advertising based on monitoring users' online behaviour and specifically about the backlash against Phorm.

Unbelievably, this was only my first solo '25' of the 2009 season.  In part this has been because there seems to have been a smaller number of events in the London North district, but also because of calendar clashes with, for example, our cycle tour in June, and in part my reluctance to return to racing on the F1 courses after the Icknield RC '25' back in May.  Anyway, the long and short of it was that my performance was not what I would have liked.

The morning was rather nicer than the forecast indicated during the week, while is was quite breezy in a blustery way, there was no rain and with the sunny spells was quite pleasantly warm.  The event was held on the F13/25, which runs along the A41 from near Launton to the outskirts of Aylesbury and back,  and it's not a particularly quick course, including some quite tough sections, including a steep bank about 9 minutes in to the event.  There's also the dreaded traffic lights at a pedestrian crossing in Waddesdon (immediately outside a police station!), at which a marshal is stationed to spot errant riders running the red light.

I caught this excellent sketch on this week's That Mitchell & Webb Look (BBC2).

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0 580x360]

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: