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.  

I've been using Joomla! quite extensively over the past few years, and at the moment have four websites built in Joomla! (version 1.5.11 at the time of writing):

Flies&Bikes (this site - uses the commercial blogging component MyBlog)

So, over the last few weeks (and while I've been away and not blogging), the vile company Phorm - formerly spyware merchants 121media - have been in the news. In rough chronological order:

• They raised £15 million in some share deal or other
• They began talking of (and, I think began) trials of their vile DPI system in South Korea
• They pre-empted their financial results with the announcement of a desktop implementation of their behavioral advert targeting (strangely undescriptive)
• Financial results were released, revealing no income over the year, but expenditure of $50 million

The question in my mind is, how long can a company with a poor reputation (due to their previous activities), with an intrusive and possibly illegal technology, which has no ISP partners signed up (even after three trials - one open, the other two secret) keep going?

Some time ago I signed an e-petition at www.number10.gov.uk - this aimed to question the establishment of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC), popularly known on the blogosphere as Ofquack.  I have little sympathy with quackitioners, practising a startling array of "therapies" which pretty much all lack evidence of efficacy.  Singh and Ernst's Trick of Treatment offers a good and clear overview of the major CAM treatments out there.  The petition read:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to require evicence of basic efficacy and safety for licencing by the CNHC."

Details of Petition:

"The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) issues approval certificates to Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine practitioners, but this approval is currently independent of actual evidence of efficacy or safety. It is likely that practitioners will use CNHC approval to imply efficacy and safety, even though it promises no such thing. We, the undersigned, therefore petition that the CNHC requirements be tightened to include evidence of efficacy and safety."

This year's cycle tour was partly blogged as I went (only slightly successful, as internet access with my Vodafone modem was patchy and 2G at best).  For this writeup of the tour, I've updated the blog articles, and linked them to this article.

Day 1 - Tayport to Aberfeldy  In which we meet old friends, both expected and unexpected.

Today's ride was on home turf, practically, as we were riding roads we frequented when we lived in Dundee for a decade.  We returned to Dundee via Caputh, Coupar Angus, Newtyle and Muirhead, followed by a frantic ride through Dundee to the Tay Bridge.  Because we reached Dundee around mid-day, the traffic was reasonably light, and we had no real issues.

35.64 miles; 10.7 mph ave; 27.2 mph max; 3:18:04; total distance 523.33 miles

We spent just about all of today on Cycle Route 7.  We had a few light showers between Aviemore and Kingussie, but really the day was dry with many sunny spells.

Setting out from Aviemore, we chose not to ride initally on route 7, as this would have added 4 or 5 miles - instead we chose a more direct B road.  Kingussie looks more like a "real Scottish town than does Aviemore - it has a main street lined with older stone-built properties.  Route 7 works pretty well as far as Dalwhinnie (notable mostly it seems to me for an elegant distillery building - and presumably the distillery within!). 

On another fair day, we began by traversing the Black Isle, first through mixed arable farmland, and then mixed woodland.  This involved a surprising amount of climbing.  We eventually picked up cycle route 1 (for Inverness) at Munlochy.

This proved to be quite a circuitous route, and eventually led us under the A9 to cross the Kessock Bridge on a path alongside the northbound carriageway! Unfortunately, this deposited us in a huge industrial estate, among huge articulated lorries. We extricated oursleves by ignoring any cycle route signs, unfortunately, this led us to take cycle paths which required us to cross busy dual carriageways.

Up bright and early, with lovely blue sky with puffy white clouds scudding across! Set off eastwards, initially flat, but then climbing through woodland, with plenty of rhododendrons.  After a while, we emerged onto rather bare mountainous landscape.

We reached Achnasheen at about 11.30am, and stopped at the cafe for paninis and tea. Pressing on, we eventually started a gentle descent through woodland. We were aware of big black clouds, and as we approached the main road to Inverness at Gorstan, we had the first proper drenching of the tour so far. It was fortunately quite short-lived, as the rain was pretty cold!

We woke after a well-earned sleep, for an 8am breakfast.  The plan for today was to ride over to Lochcarron, a short day in mileage terms, but one packed with steep climbs, particularly on the south side of Lochcarron (of which more later).
We rode off towards the Skye Bridge on a rather undistinguished road.  Snce the bridge was built, it seems to me that the character of the motor traffic has changed, if not the character of the island.  Stll, it afforded some good views of Skye and the mainland.  The bridge itself is surprisingly steep, but quite manageable. 

Once back on the mainland, we paused to look at the map. Being a bit fed up with the mainroads we'd been on since Lochailort on the previous day, we decided to take the winding and quite arduous unclassified roads from Kyle of Lochalsh, through several villages to rejoin the main road above Stromeferry. This route takes you through delightful broadleaf woods with cuckoos calling (and less fortunately midges, though at this time of year they're not too much of a problem).  We briefly stopped at Plockton station for a cuppa, but found the restaurant there had closed down.  We stopped to brew up teas a little further down the road, by a patch of woodland with a bunch of cows - they seemed to find us fascinating and came to have a fair old nosey-parker!

Our sojourn at the excellent Salen Hotel ended with the finest breakfast of the trip. Everything about it exuded quality - bacon, scrambled eggs (on a potato scone), mushrooms, sausage (their own recipe) and Stornoway black pudding set me up famously. But before that, I'd been out to sort the gears - turned out the indexing was way out of whack.

The weather this morning was glorious - sunshine and clouds, but a bit cooler than of late. The road over to Lochailort features quite a bit of climbing (before the biggest climb, over to Loch Ailort, we were hailed by a bunch of sea kayakers) but the roads were splendid, leading us through fabulous woodland. As we approached Lochailort, we spotted a steam train heading for Mallaig, emitting vast clouds of smoke.