Small Beds and Large Bears

To the editor of Cycle, the CTC magazine:
Sir,
It’s always a shame to see factions of CTC cyclists still arguing with each other over whether one “ought” to either wear, or be forced to wear, a helmet. The argument last in a recent couple of letters pages rears its head so often that the editor might [...]

Christmastime and Christmastide wait for no man, and there’s been plenty to prevent me from following up on my doom-laden thoughts about COP15 and what might happen if it failed: which it did. Before 2009 draws entirely to a close it’s probably worth a few brief words on the subject.
It’s important to acknowledge from the [...]

I admire skepticism. Being cool-headed about empirical situations helps you make informed conclusions, and hence decisions, even as you might labour under the pressure of those situations.
Science constitutes formalized skepticism: strictly so in its theoretical, dehumanized sense; more approximately so in the way that scientists as a whole practice their craft. But science’s skepticism is [...]

I’ve been a Popperian for years. That’s not to say I’m a fan of Robert Popper (although I am); rather that I susbscribe broadly to Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. The basic tenet of it is that science advances only through making audacious predictions; that such predictions are ones that ought, given our existing experience, [...]

There are phantom cows in a field near our offices. The horses chew the grass at one end of the enclosure, accompanied by a pony who spent a whole summer two years ago pretending to be their foal, in order to be fed apples. At the other end is their stable, the ground around it [...]

Bad journalism should not be mistaken for bad research. For example, via Brennig comes an instance of the BBC casually and cavalierly cutting and pasting from the inaugural speech. This is pretty low, but hardly a surprise. It’s certainly no lower than the levels to which the BBC, the Mail, the Sun or the rest [...]

For those of you not paying much attention (I don’t blame you), Quiet little Lies has had a new revamp, quieter but more fundamental than before. Expect new content, more often. There’s even a LiveJournal syndication for those who fancy it.
We’re also offering a third free booklet of fiction to your door in time for [...]

Via Rachel North, I present the return of the most annoying people ever to grace drinks advertising, the Wassup crowd. Don’t click away: it’s worth watching as far as one of them trying to hang himself:

I envisage a followup video based on the Bud-Weis-Er frogs, with a take-your-pick permutation of high-up Republicans taking [...]

Radio 2 announced yesterday that the weather this last month is “the worst since records began.” I had no idea that weather could be submitted to moral judgments, and was interested precisely how this had been discovered, and what the Pope might have to say about it. To my disappointment it turned out that the [...]

CRB mentions that this feels like the windiest year [he] can remember. Certainly every year since around 2000 has had the weirdest weather I could at that point remember, if not necessarily the windiest.
When I first began cycling a hardcore roundtrip to work (2003–2004 was the year of my Headington–Abingdon commute) I felt over [...]