Keeping it twee

from the department of frank censorship

One obviously spends less time on Twitter since its degeneration into an unmoderated sewer.  I switched some of this freed attention into Reddit, which still manages to attract some light-hearted wit from contributors.

I quite like r/CasualUK for this, but yesterday I fell afoul of its "no politics" rule. So by the rules of this blog, the exchange appears here.

House of Lords passes the Dutch on the left hand side

 from the department of the eternally hosted comment

I'm something of a Carlton Reid fan—I buy his books anyway—and I'm full of admiration for the tenacity of his career as a journalist covering the cycle business. He is to my view somewhat over-enthusiastic about the merits of separatist cycle infrastructure, but this is a matter for reasonable debate, and at least he does actually ride a bike. So I'm inclined to forgive him when I revisit his site bikebiz.com, and find that a comment that I left on a story he wrote in April 2017 about some clueless peer's ignorant waffling in the House of Lords has disappeared. Comments often seem to be the first casualty of website design makeovers, and in this case archive.org seems not to have come to my remarks' rescue. So here they are again, now with illustrations.

This idea of the Netherlands as some sort of transport paradise really does need a dose of reality. Firstly, while their overall road mortality compares favourably with that of other European countries, they're hardly immune to road deaths.

All European countries observed a decline in cycling as cars became widely available in the sixties and seventies. While the Netherlands are to be congratulated for arresting this decline better than most, they have not grown cycling since.

Yet in global terms they do occupy one of the most favourable topographies for cycling on the planet.The solution they found back then—of rigid separation of modes—has its virtues, but cannot be unquestioningly adopted in other localities—might hills make a difference for example?
Since the seventies, motorists have not improved their reputation: the ongoing road slaughter, oil wars, an obesity crisis, and pollution episodes can all be laid directly at their door, even before we consider the contribution of motoring to anthropogenic climate change. More thoughtful parliamentarians would be considering how to kick the motors out altogether, not bleating about a few cycle paths.

This seems a good place to note that I consider the House of Lords to be an insult to the notion of democracy, and I'd sack the lot of them if I could. Confronted with such evident idiocy in the legislature, it is natural to wonder how the hell to get rid of one. Answer: you can't. Dictators Peers for life! Ho hum!

Transparency real and imagined

from the all very well in theory department

Back in August I came across this blogpost—a somewhat generic homily on the importance of openness and transparency in scientific communication. I share the author's optimism that open access to the scientific literature will provide better validation of published work than traditional systems of peer review. But unless this superior access is actually exploited by knowledgeable users, the potential gains may not be realized. Though a blinking cursor beckoned me below the line, the author has, in his or her wisdom, failed to publish my comment. So it must appear here:

Transparency is superior to trust—as long as some relevant person(s) actually exploit(s) the transparency. Look at how long that ssl flaw hung about in Debian, for example: https://pinboard.in/u:juliusbeezer/t:security/t:opensource/
That was all open code, utterly vital to the security of hordes of crucial servers run by the world's top-most geeks, and therefore, every internet user. But the problem sat there for two years, apparently.
That's an extreme example that did get fixed. Transparency is necessary yes, but unless it's actually backed by readers/critics/reviewers/coders/experts actually looking through the windowpane afforded by it, its value is only rhetorical.
It does mean that the guards can guard the guards and we can watch the guards guarding the guards though. Or maybe McGregor-Maywether.

The unbearable asymmetry of bullshit

 from the department of anti-link-rot-action 

Somewhat at random it has been my custom to follow the blog of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics in my RSS reader, and occasionally I would even feel moved by the spirit of enlightenment to offer up a comment to the august minds philosophizing there. Sadly the blog now seems to be in a state of permanent technical failure, effectively removing these comments from public view. My cacheing system has worked nicely though, so I guess it's up to me to take over the hosting from here on. I was particularly pleased with this comment, which pulls together my thinking on attention, agnotology, peer review and bullshit, written in response to this article by Brian Earp:

The key problem with bullshit that enjoys a certain "truthiness" is attentional: its presence is a time-wasting distraction from the good stuff. The agnotological processes whereby e.g. the tobacco companies, or climate change denialists, skew "debates" by creating false controversy is well-studied. In theory scholarly publishing should be relatively resistant to this process by the diligent application of peer review, but this merely displaces the reader's attentional process to a consideration of the judgement of the peer reviewers, potentially also prone to the retransmission of bullshit. The detail and verbosity of scholarly refutation amplifies the attentional problem.

Whilst freedom of expression worthy of the name must surely include the freedom to bullshit, the solution surely lies in maintaining reputational systems that offer the user efficient filtering systems that enable the basic command "never show content by this author again." It would be an error to universalise such judgement, for we all have our own foibles and tolerances. For example the Facebook system assigns a single "interest score" to each post which is then used to rate each post for all users. Twitter's "follow/unfollow" mechanism, which delegates filtering to the judgement of each individual user is much closer to what is required. The Pirate Party's attempts to implement "liquid democracy," whereby rank and file members anoint experts as delegates on any particular issue is also worthy of study.
Drinking at the commenting firehose at a heavily-trafficked site can be made less overwhelming using ranking systems (see Slashdot). And so on.

Frankfurt's book is of course itself somewhat bullshitty, devoting as it does, a substantial part of its rather slender discussion to a lengthy argument establishing that bullshit is synonymous with humbug. (What is humbug?) But hey! It's a fun cite on any reference list.

Harry Frankfurt seems a most charming man. This interview is a better outline to his thought than the book. He has humbly acknowledged elsewhere his surprise that his university press wished to work up his essay into a slender book:

Lamentable Corbyn-basher refuses debate

I felt moved to offer a comment below this blogpost, which claims Jeremy Corbyn is "unelectable" because of his positions he has struck in the past on matters Irish:

Classifying Corbyn's statement that he would commemorate all those who have died in the cause of Irish independence as "support for the IRA": just a tad crude? Would there have been a Good Friday agreement without the left's recognition of the justice of the republican movement?
Of course, that doesn't stop anyone misrepresenting Corbyn's views in the way that you suggest. But it would still be a misrepresentation. The English electorate may well be ignorant enough to find such over-simplification attractive; but that is hardly a recommendation. Fortunately the electorate has other sources of information than admen's billboards these days.
Neither would participating in a "minute of silence" (however convened) be equated with endorsement in most reasonable people's minds: politicians should pause for reflection more often!

I'm posting it here under the rule that it is rejected comments that are most interesting (the site, a standard WordPress design, is purportedly open to comments, but only one suspiciously unctuous comment has actually made it to below the line. Ho hum!). 

Update 28/11/16: Nice example of how anyone can get caught up in a minute of silence.

Taking the high road

from the they-don't-have-hills-do-they? department

Everyone who is sincere about encouraging greater use of the bicycle and less use of the private motor vehicle in the urban environment is naturally interested in the experience in the two countries where this tendency is most advanced: the Netherlands and Denmark. But the trend to copy those countries' cycle infrastructure with seemingly minimal consideration about whether this is appropriate for its new locality is highly questionable.

Here in Nantes such separatist infrastructure is proliferating, with, in some cases, bans for cyclists who use the (superior) road alongside, so I do question it. A good example of this regrettable tendency is the two-way cycle track that has been laid parallel to the D75 which runs from the village of Indre, at sea-level on the Loire, to Orvault, ten kilometres north. Orvault bourg is fifty metres above sea-level. To get there, you climb out of the Loire valley, and up onto the lip of the Massif Armorican. This is considered a mountain range by the geologists, though it's a low one.

It's not quite true to say they don't have any hills at all in Holland or Denmark, but basically they don't. In the Netherlands, according to Wikipedia, half of the country is within one metre of elevation above sea level, and another quarter below. Now ask any cyclist: "Do hills make a difference?" Duh!

I rode the D75 last Saturday, and on its rather abrupt climbs and descents reflected just how inappropriate a narrow cycle lane is for such circumstances. Of course the D75 itself is beautifully engineered and smooth, as is normal in France, but the separated cycle lane is narrow, and there is no separate provision for pedestrians who are, admittedly, few. One is obliged to stop (stop line + stop sign) at even the most minor crossings (a hotel entrance, a farm road etc). Entries and exits to it from the major roundabouts are awkwardly angled. I don't have a speedo on the bike, but I'd guess I'd usually go about 45 km/h on the descents. Such a speed is safe enough on a road designed for motor traffic, but the reduced sight lines on the cycle path, and the loss of priority at side roads would make such speeds folly on the cycle path.

On city streets, I guess, I am mostly resigned to playing my part in the charade of motor traffic reduction. If you narrow the carriageway, motorists will drive more slowly, which is safer for everybody, and the so-called "cycle infrastructure" which serves as cover for this reduction in available space for driving is, I suppose, potentially progressive. I've scored a pair of 2-inch wide Schwalbe Kojak tyres for bouncing around the assorted kerbs, tiles, cobbles, and lumps and bumps that Nantes' mayor seems to think we cyclists will enjoy, and I'll certainly be hopping off the cycle path and onto the carriageway as I see fit.

I plan to continue to use the carriageway if I desire brisk progress though, and out in the countryside I'm damned if I'll be chased off France's excellent departmental road network: being able to ride on it is why I moved here.

Happily my fellow lycra-clad compatriots agree: there were quite a few of us roadies still using the road, and quite a few Sunday riders on their mountain bikes on the path (with assorted joggers and dogwalkers). That, it seems to me, is as it should be, though I shall continue to investigate how to reverse the cycling bans on the D75, D39D69 and D107. A clear statement by the mayor that "of course the paths are for the new cyclists," and "naturally we have no desire to impinge upon the traditional rights of existing cyclists," would be useful (and they can take those "No cycling" signs down while they're at it).

In an attempt to better understand the kind of cyclist who thinks separatist infrastructure would be a good idea, I'm following a few exemplars of the type on Twitter, and trying to understand their point of view. One wears a helmetcam as he commutes on busy A-roads around Glasgow (@magnatom); another is a cycling mother who wants to ride on the road with her four year old in Hackney (@bikesandbabies); and a third a Tyneside cycle campaigner who has a German cultural perspective (@katsdekker).

All three share a touching faith in "better cycling infrastructure." I don't disagree with this for major roads (where there are angled slip roads), but if you were to ask me to increase cycling levels as a policy objective, I'd suggest fewer cars, more courteously driven, and better training for cyclists, not some fantasy parallel reality imagined into being by the most anxious cyclists out there. Cycle training is easy for policymakers to pay for. What is not readily legislated for, but what is really required, is greater respect and courtesy from drivers towards cyclists. Strict liability laws would help. So when Kats Dekker suggested on her blog that:

We should be listening to the people who we want to see cycling in the (near) future i.e. the 97%, and make them the subject of our city cycling research – through their eyes can we see the “real” world. Due to circumstances beyond their control, the current cyclist had to turn a blind eye. The current cyclist is desensitised – not by making a conscious decision.

In other words, ignore the 3% of people who actually do cycle when formulating cycle policy, I did feel impelled to respond:

It is true that a perception of danger is the main reason that non-cyclists cite for not cycling. But people say many things. Yer Conservative voter was famously reticent with the pollsters in the run-up to the recent general election for example. But the underlying problem is that it is not normal to cycle. Most people consider themselves to be normal, and would like to drive a car they've seen advertised on the telly.

As for the minority who do cycle turning "a blind eye" to danger: I doubt that this is true, or they wouldn't be cyclists for very long. Existing cyclists have learned to take their place in the traffic. Yes, road conditions can be demanding, and we can all imagine better. Training helps. "See that cycle lane on the left? Ignore it as you approach the junction!" There: just cut your actual risk of dying on your bike by more than 50%.

Note: if a business is trying to grow, it first tries harder to satisfy its existing customers...

Ms. Dekker has not to date posted the comment, so it is published here on the usual premise that it is rejected comments that are the most interesting and valuable. I note the one (anodyne) comment which was posted under that article seems to have disappeared. This lack of desire to discuss her ideas (which resembles Hembrow's) would be sufficient explanation for her being so mistaken in her views.

***
Update 2319h 19/7/19. Following the introduction of separatist-critique tag, the Guardian comment that was here is now has its own page.

May the earth hear the words of my mouth

from the truth-is-still-getting-its-boots-on dept

Email to the Editor, JewishVoiceNY.com [sent 16:39h, 30/12/2014]

Dear Editor,

I live in Nantes, and I have a google news alert set up for Nantes, which is how I came across your story entitled: ' "French Rampage Attack Injures Ten; Driver Shouted "Allahu Akbar" ' (http://jewishvoiceny.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9591:french-rampage-attack-injures-ten-driver-shouted-qallahu-akbarq&catid=106:international&Itemid=289)

I was in the area that evening, and have followed the press coverage of this event particularly closely. Your account is at variance with the local press reports, which clearly state that there was NO reputable report that the driver shouted "Allahu Akbar;" indeed this was categorically denied:

e.g. https://twitter.com/OuestFrance/status/547125894389977089

If the driver had indeed made such an utterance, there were certainly plenty of witnesses available to hear it.

I accordingly submitted a comment at the foot of your story which read:

"
All official sources reported by Ouest France are quite categorical that the driver in Nantes did NOT shout Allahu Akbar: http://www.ouest-france.fr/accident-place-royale-des-blesses-au-marche-de-noel-3076473 (Fr). There were certainly plenty of witnesses to hear him, should he have done so.
Place Royale is a public square in the centre of Nantes, not an "area."
"

This you have yet to publish. I wonder if you have any plans to do so? I would be interested to know of your decision.

With best wishes,

D.

Update: 1110h 10/1/15. No reply has been received from the editors, and the comment has yet to appear at the foot of the page, so it is published here.

It is interesting to consider how sketchy the evidence is for anything said amidst the understandable distress occasioned by violent events, even when immediate formal investigation of living witnesses is possible, as here. And how easy it is invent any old nonsense that suits your agenda, and broadcast it to the world. But the truth will out, even if, as it would appear, that's not a business that Jewish Voice NY is in.

[About the title: "May the earth hear the words of my mouth" is the masthead slogan of Jewish Voice NY, may peace be upon them]

Better to keep quiet and be thought a fool...

from the all-doubts-removed dept

I quite liked the Three Percent podcast in many ways: those guys served my mental model of conversation with a couple of smarty pants east coast literary types. Host Chad Post seems a knowledgeable guy, if slightly pressured in his speech; the lofty drawl of regular guest the bookseller Tom Roberge served in pleasant contrast to him—their chemistry is good. And their objective—of promoting the sale and reading of translated books in the US—is entirely honourable.

So it is with modest regret that I write this post (and hit unsubscribe), following my strict artistic rule that comments that I write for publication in situ "below the line" of a blogpost that do not get posted (for whatever reason) must be logged here.

Briefly, the setup: about 45 minutes into podcast #85, Chad and Tom start to discuss the translation of various English language titles that have been translated into French, and also French titles that have been translated into English. Unfortunately, in so doing, Tom Roberge revealed some rather basic ignorance of the French language, which, considering some of his claims in previous podcasts—to have been welcomed as an honorary member of "Oulipo" for example—are is plainly an embarrassment for all concerned.

Now, ignorance is not to be condemned wholesale—anyone that tussles regularly with the French language knows it's a tricky beast that's best not provoked—and we're all at where we're at in our knowledge of it.

But still, given the academic pretensions of the host, it seemed important to set the errors straight—to leave them unremarked would be to foster ignorance.

Turning to the comments to contest the matter, I found that someone called Marc had already beaten me to the correction of the most egregious errors—Chad and Tom had seemed unaware that the verb "tirer" does indeed mean "to fire [a shot]" as well as "to pull"; and that "personne" does indeed mean "nobody/no-one" as well as "person." As these matters can be resolved simply by consulting a dictionary, these are hardly worthy of further discussion. (Though obviously it would have been worth actually doing this before slagging off the translations in a podcast).

It is more challenging to consider the adequacy of "Whatever" as a translation for Michel Houellebecq's "Extension du domaine de la lutte," but emboldened by the evidently blank terrain that had opened before me, I wrote:

Wot Marc said.

And I would add Houellebecq's title "Extension du domaine de la lutte" is not so nonsensical as all that: "Lutte" (~struggle, but also wrestling (the sport), and political movement) is a common enough word in French. The protagonist's failure with women and incipient racism set up two areas of struggle in his life: what's not to translate?

It is understandable that a title along the lines of 'Expansion of the struggle into new areas'** was not felt to be a commercial proposition by the publisher. We can only surmise the editorial process that led to the choice of 'Whatever', but I sense loss (as in someone lost)—and mischief—all the way.

—**Maybe seek out some retro Trotskyist newsprint before committing to a precise phrase.

I just wrote the comment, clicked submit, and moved on. Someone was wrong on the internet, correction supplied, we've all learned something. But what is totally unacceptable to me (and it is for this reason that I have unsubscribed from the podcast) is that when I went back later to check the comments, I found that they've suppressed the comments altogether.

Fortunately the Disqus commenting system used makes it possible for me to reconstruct the discussion here. But how dishonest! If I have a bête noire online, it is sites that pretend to host comments, but then don't post the ones they don't like. Of course that is their right: but it's also contemptible, and I'll always call it out here.

Update 12:09h, 13/1/15. Both Chad and Tom have responded to this post on Twitter so I have Storify-ed the relevant tweets. (This was a good opportunity to play with Storify for the first time. Verdict: OK to meh). In setting up the comment in this post I mistakenly conflated two different Three Percent contributors in my own mind, Tom Roberge and Daniel Levin Becker. Becker is the Oulipo man, not Roberge. Sincere apologies for this error.

On the mysterious disappearance of *Dr* Douglas Carnall

   Between 1994 to 2007, if you'd asked me, "What do you do?" I suppose I'd have replied, "I'm a GP." Certainly that was how I mostly earned money, even if I rejected much of the ideology of the discipline. This was a delicate matter. My chief concern was to keep my workload within reasonable limits, which I did by working as a locum and billing by the hour.  Such an attitude was a certainly an affront to the notions of vocation claimed by the betweeded denizens of the British Journal of General Practice. I had no desire to confront this ideology: it seemed in many ways humane, certainly in comparison with other parts of the profession. And anyway, I didn't really have the intellectual tools to do so, and wasn't particularly interested—at that time—in acquiring them.
   Still, I was flattered, in 2003, to be called by one of the editors of the Br J Gen Pract, and asked to write about blogging for the back pages of the journal, presumably on the strength of the columns I'd been writing about the internet for the BMJ for several years.
   I remember finding the BJGP article hard to write: I'm not sure that I shared the vision of the commissioning editor, and I was certainly more interested in maintaining my own blog and making music at the time. But I wrote something, and delivered it, probably on time, and in due course, it appeared.
  Usually I enjoy rereading my old stuff, but not that one. By that time I'd developed significant disillusion with the dis-ease of use of the free software of the epoch. I was ambivalent about proposing that all doctors should blog, though I'd taken it up myself. Doing it on free software seemed almost insurmountably difficult; yet handing over all comms and memory to predatory capitalists and intrusive state agencies using proprietary platforms was as much an evident danger back then as it is now. I didn't pose the issue explicitly in the article, but my nagging doubts that I was merely a fashion victim do seep through, I think, and it's hardly a comfortable position as an author.
  A decade later, happily retired from general practice, I suppose I was right that blogging would catch on: both Twitter and Facebook are effectively blogging platforms; but wrong that this would greatly affect general practitioners, who seem largely absent from them. I guess taking up blogging would be something to be done on the eighth day of the week. And the duty of confidentiality makes any discussion of individual cases online so fraught as to be best avoided entirely. Neither has the publishing world's snail-like progress towards open access aided trade among doctors in professional articles. Progress towards the noble goal of making the world's scientific literature open to anyone who cares to read it, has, to my mind, been disappointingly slow, though things are going in the right direction.
  Anyway, when I moved to France in August 2007 "for six months off" I stopped paying all of my medical subscriptions, including to the Royal College of General Practitioners, and felt that it was only right that I should saw the MRCGP off my name (the M stands for member). And as holders of a bachelor's degree in medicine are addressed as doctor only as a courtesy for clinical settings, I have converted, for all purposes, to being a simple monsieur, et toute ma vie y est améliorée.

HuffPo atheists: "Let (some) freedoms ring"

from the freedom-from-illegal-invasions-is-also-a-human-right department
   The Huffington Post irritates in so many ways—from its browser-jamming javascripts, to its hideous advertising, to its forcing its .fr content upon me, even if I specify a .com URL. Still, HuffPo's been hard to avoid on general internet patrol recently, after my impulsive decision to follow one of its Middle East specialists for a while.
   Thus it was that I came upon this conversation between two north American atheists, of Pakistani and Iraqi origin. Now I feel a certain extra responsibility and compassion for the people of Iraq—it was, after all, partly my taxes that paid for their country to be royally fucked over in recent years. Getting one's head round the situation there obliges a wider concern with the Middle East more generally.  But this is the kind of thing that I'd usually read quickly and move on: sadly, 'middle eastern atheists cop their share of oppression, and there's plenty to go around,' is not such a surprising message. But there was something about their mutual consensus that people in the West "take their rights for granted" while supporting, in the same paragraph, the illegal actions of Western governments towards their former countries, that I thought was maybe worth puncturing.
   Comments were apparently open at the foot of the article, but my attempt to post a comment (using my Twitter account) failed, I know I'll get spammed to death if I give them my email, and I don't particularly think my friends will be interested in a HuffPo Facebook app spewing all over their timelines. So I gave up. Someone remains wrong on the internet! But, following the strict artistic rule that it is the comments that are difficult to post in situ that are most worth publishing, here it is:

It is certainly a good point that many in the West take their rights for granted because the political struggle for them took place before they were born; but the invasion of Iraq was a great crime precisely because, in doing so, the US and the UK were thumbing their noses at the authority of the UN's Security Council, and by extension the post-WWII settlement. In his hurry to damn the American left, and roam the world removing dictators he doesn't like, the M. Al-Mutar seems to have forgotten this.

Bayesian limits to screening populations for rarities e.g. "being a terrorist"

Silicon valley software engineer Ben Adida (36) certainly doesn't hesitate to grovel before his president in his recent blog post concerning the recent revelations of US state surveillance of the internet: ["...I’m no stubborn idealist... I know you cannot steer a ship as big as the United States as quickly as some would like. I know tough compromises are the inevitable path to progress... The responsibility you feel, the level of detail you understand, must make prior principles sometimes feel quaint. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be in your shoes..."] Yuk! The ship of state, with its concomitant all-powerful captain fully implied. Yuk, and yuk again, puke! But M. Adida does make a good point about the unintuitive statistical operation of true and false positives in population screening programmes, be they medical or criminological. The explanation he offers on his blog is correct, but lacks detail. More seriously, for anyone who'd like to know more, a couple of keywords needed to construct a quality search are missing. These were "false positive" AND "Bayes", so I decided to post a wee comment mentioning that, and a link to the best explanation I found. Perhaps M. Adida has just had enough of blog spam, but he seems to accept comments only very selectively on his blog: and mine was not one. Ho hum! Anyway, he's quite right to point out that even a good (say 99% accurate) test for a rare condition (e.g. being a terrorist) applied to a large, mostly innocent population will generate WAY MORE false positives than true positives. This has two bad effects: 1) innocent people are wrongly suspected and subjected to further unjustified intrusion and harassment; and 2) law enforcement time is wasted. You might suppose that intelligences sufficient to build data centres capable of archiving the whole internet would also be fully conversant with Bayes' Theorem. But with no meaningful oversight, how can we be sure? Idiocy is common; and mission creep happens all the time. Just like the Hackney wide boys who can't resist trying out their guns over the back hedge once they've bought them, the temptation to mine all that data must be well-nigh irresistible--but wrong.

Cycle apartheid enthusiast rejects effusion

There's a man called David Hembrow, a resident of the Netherlands, who enthuses about the virtues of the Dutch policy of taking cyclists round the back of every bus stop here. It seems he doesn't really like having his ideas questioned, nor in hosting an honest debate on the issues he raises, which would explain how his views have become so misguided. Ho hum! Here's my comment on his recent post anyway, which M. Hembrow had hoped to moderate out of existence:

These 'cycle paths' round the back of bus stops are exceptionally irritating: I've been negotiating the recently installed series on Brighton's Lewes Road in both directions this summer, and I don't like them one bit. Firstly: why does the cyclist go the long way round? In other words, why should the cyclist negotiate two additional bends and ride some extra metres at each bus stop on each journey? Then, as you mention, there's the usually inferior surface on the 'cycle path' to contend with, the kerbs, the bollards, the additional signage. But now, when I wisely ignore this evidence of local government idiocy, I get hoots and shouts from motorists for being in "their" space. I have no words for this publishable on a family blog such as this one! NO!

Plus: human factors: bus stop users expect traffic in front of them on the carriageway, but not necessarily behind them while waiting, or crossing the 'cycle lane' to the bus stop. So the prudent cyclist using such a 'facility' seeing people in the vicinity of the stop ***inevitably has to slow down.*** Meanwhile public transport users get to occupy a space with traffic whizzing by them on both sides: not good for parents of young children waiting at the bus stop.

Meanwhile, the real users of the road environment, the important people, the people who it's all for: the private motorists, continue on their sweet way, untrammelled by any consideration of users of other modes.

Proponents of these "dif-facilities" are misguided apologists for the triumph of the motor car, in Holland as much as anywhere else. Why else would they be so keen to place obstacles in the way of the cyclist, while removing cyclists' right to follow the ancient desire lines across the land established in antiquity?
If you must insist on modal separation on wider roads, then a 4-metre+ (i.e. generously wide) bus and cycle lane, which leaves pedestrians/public transport users on the pavement, and where the cyclist, enjoying a luxurious and tyre-swept lane whose only other occupants are accountable, professional drivers, has room to overtake stationary buses without changing lanes.

Naturally I keeps a backup copy of every comment I submit, for precisely these occasions: it's the comments that the blogger refuses to publish that are most worthy of heightened attention...

Update 21/4/17: Here's a good example of the kind of annoyance this arrangement generates for pedestrians (and any cyclist accepting the local authority's invitation to ride on the sidewalk) (via road.cc). (A bit sweary, your maiden aunt may appreciate you listening on headphones, if she's within earshot):

And here's a picture of the classic Dutch "round the back of the garage" arrangement (mustn't obstruct petrol sales now, must we?). Note the sharp blind curve it creates:

The mysterious workings of Jehovah

The Jehovah's witnesses came today. Or rather I came upon them as they were rather snoopily examining all the names on the buzzer board at the foot of the flats "for Romanian names." I came up behind them and asked them if they were looking for someone. They said, "O that's a pretty accent, where are you from?" To which I replied (not yet knowing they were Jehovah's witnesses) "It's a secret. In fact, I'm Belgian." I get rather tired of having an accent when I speak French. I suppose I should work on it. It turns out one of them speaks Romanian, so they are looking for Romanian names on buzzers to practise on. Or at least that's what they tell me. I suppose they could be Petainist collaborators identifying immigrants. That's me. British, in France, slightly paranoid. They looked harmless enough: two French ladies in their late middle years, smiling, un-botoxed.

I like it when the Jehovah's witnesses call, because it is an opportunity to get them to mend their fundamentalist ways, in particular their strict adherence to the Bible as the source of authority on all things, which if it was ever a good idea, even some thousands of years ago, is certainly not today.

My method is as follows: I explain to them that I was brought up a Quaker, which some of them have heard of, and some not, and that the one thing that Quakers and Jehovah's witnesses certainly share is being pacifist. Furthermore I add, with my greatest charm, when I lived in London, the Jehovah's witnesses were just about the only people who would come and knock on your door for a chat, an action which increases conviviality, however misguided the ideas which give rise to the behaviour. A woman from the council did come to suggest I make compost once, but I'd already been making my own for about five years at the time. I lived in a safe Labour seat in London, so certainly no political party ever darkened my door, ever. You have to go out for your politics in London.

Anyway, having gained the witnesses' attention, and assured them that I am friendly--the amount of surly knockbacks they must receive on each evangelical canvassing session must be considerable--I improvise.

Tonight, I satisfied myself by saying I certainly have a bible upstairs--in fact I have several--but I also have a koran, and several hundred other books besides. But I like the Jehovah's witnesses' action, because it makes me think "If you could only have one book, what would it be?" And to consider the days when books were so precious that the average number of books owned by an ordinary person would be approaching zero. "Religion is the scaffold of thought," I say, because I honestly believe that without religion in the past we would have no intellectual heritage today. The French are very keen on harking back to the Greeks and the Romans (wisely leaving out about 15 centuries of medieval stasis til the Renaissance) but anyway, it's a long story, but religions that today insist on the primacy of a single text, without weighing it against others, or considering how texts come into being and are valued, are basically just adding to the smokescreen, not trying to blow it away.

So that's me and the Jehovah's witnesses. I am always very nice and polite, and so are they, and usually they end our interview by giving me a leaflet, emboldened with biblical citation, and sometimes illustrated with pictures of nice multiracial gatherings with a lion lying down with a lamb in the background or somesuch. They definitely have a house style.

I'd like to know more about what leads Jehovah's witnesses to their faith. I suppose in entering such an out group, and believing so strongly in heaven helps certain kinds of humans to deal with being human better than if they were not Jehovah's witnesses, and so, I suppose, good luck to them. Apart from the nagging doubt that their canvassing is designed to detect and exploit minds less robust (hah!) than my own. Knowing that they must have doors slammed rudely in their faces pretty often, but dealing with them in a convivial manner myself gives me a rosy internal glow of virtue, and so for me anyway, they are very good, and a welcome element on the social scene.

I'd quite like to quote from their leaflet to round off this post, but it seems to have disappeared into the literary compost with which I surround myself, or perhaps it's still in my shirt pocket, which is next door, and the baby is now sleeping and a bit poorly, so I'll just have to content myself with quoting my favourite line from the bible, which is this: Ecclesiastes 1:18 For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

Sorry about that.

The (not-so) strange disappearance of M. Elizabeth Filkin

It was surprising that there was no wikipedia page for Elizabeth Filkin, the former parliamentary commissioner for standards until yesterday...

The mysterious disappearance of M. Julius Beezer

One of the links to the right reads juliuzbeezer.

Of course, at first I had an s as would be conventional in choosing the name "Julius." The conversion occurred for a couple of reasons: I did want to make a slight inflection in my blogging style. For the last ten years or so, my on-line persona was, deliberately, as faithful to my real world identity as was humanly possible. Of the first few things I wrote, one in particular yielded personal information to the internet in a way that I judged would compromise my already flimsy tissue of anonymity to the point of pointlessness. So I retired juliusbeezer into what I'd hoped'd be, by internet standards, relatively quiet obscurity.

But my new identity: "M(onsieur). Julius Beezer" has been constructed to maximise my freedom of expression without compromising any desires I might have for privacy. There is also the issue of my former patients' confidentiality to consider.

You can probably still find out who Julius Beezer is without too much difficulty, but I've tried to separate out my online identities as cleanly as I can. If you do know/work out my true identity feel free to keep it as quiet as you like.

Anyway my juliusbeezer comments at the Guardian weren't backed up locally, because it was so convenient to nip back to the Guardian site and look it up. I may even have made a bookmark (control-D folks). Tonight I'm using another machine, I go to look... juliusbeezer is gone! His handful of textual comments on Guardian material seem to be have been retired from the Guardian site, though a single summary page of interests exists that at least acknowledges he once existed. The Ministry of Truth parallels are a little alarming. What else can I say? Put it back? You've got my email. You could at least give me a little notice so I can go and scoop my own jewels before you cast them into complete obscurity.

Kids! If it ain't backed up, it ain't worth crying over. Dive into the cloud and do no wrong! But ALWAYS ALWAYS backup! See you on the road!

***

Update 28 June 2014: Achieving industrial strength internet anonymity is more hassle than I have resources for.  In any case, I realise that the space between what I was willing to say as "Douglas Carnall" and what I was willing to say as "Juliu(s|z)|Beezer" was rather small, the difference merely a cowardly loss of nerve to be resisted if at all possible. And anonymous coward is hardly an admirable position. So I've outed Julius Beezer, and stand by his works, which are mine.