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And the royal parks speed limits do somehow manage to apply to bikes.

It's possible that moving away from design optimums will eat the savings, i don't really know. Eventually new vehicles would be optimised differently, (or just all be electric).

In city driving regular braking is inevitable. How much energy it costs you just depends on how fast you were going and so how much KE you have to dump. Your late braker dumps the same amount of energy, just in a shorter time, and is trading slightly higher air losses (from sustaining their speed longer) for reduced journey time. Except that they have to wait like everyone else for the lights to change. They only win when they catch lights they would have missed.

If 20 does smooth flow and allow more green-wave light phasing and so fewer stops/journey then it wins even more.

Anyway- my point (such as it is) is that this would need significant enforcement.

At busy times you get some compulsion just from the law abiding getting in the way of the would-be law breakers.

Driving at 20 though a 30 with cars close behind i feel considerable social pressure against my judgement that 20 is right for this situation.

Driving at 20 though a 20 with cars close behind, i just think 'fuck you, you selfish arseholes'.

These people are insane;

3 Less Congestion. At 20 mph more cars occupy the same road space due shorter gaps
between them relative to 30 mph, easing traffic ‘flow’. (This makes no sense at all, if there are larger gaps between cars then it is not congested! Cars automatically end up closer when things get congested and speed slows down, does not mean a forced lower speed limit will help anything)

Lunacy.

Maybe it would be clearer if they said roads have about the same amount of car flow capacity at 20 and 30? (flow = no. cars / unit time)

Car flow capacity depends of driver behaviour so is a messy complicated phenomenon. But one strongly influenced by some simple physics. Car flow capacity = speed / separation. Cars have a minimum separation at zero speed set by the physical length of the cars. If separation didn't vary with speed then capacity would just increase with speed, and this is roughly what happens at very low speeds. If drivers maintain reaction time gaps, then separation = (zero speed separation) + (speed / reaction time), and the speed capacity graph levels off asymptotically towards 1/reaction time. If cars behave like trains and keep reaction and braking separation then the capacity curve has a maximum and decays asymptotically to zero. I think real car drivers average out to something in between train behaviour and reaction-time gaps, but whether and where there's a peak, the point is the capacity curve has pretty much levelled off by 20, so going up to 30 doesn't let the road carry more cars, it just reduces journey time a little in return for much increased energy cost and other risks.

That's not really an argument, though. Whatever time I leave I would still be riding slower, for longer (and possibly therefore emitting more pollution, not less? I don't know.)

Very unlikely to be more polluting travelling at 20 than 30, assuming same distance covered. Your motor bike uses up energy in four main ways: rolling resistance, air resistance, braking losses and engine losses. Work done against rolling resistance doesn't change with speed, air resistance and braking losses go up with the square of speed, only engine losses have terms proportional to journey time (1/speed). If you go slow enough to multiply journey time 5 or 10 fold, maybe engine losses outweigh the other savings. For a drop from 30 to 20, not so much.

What a vid.

I don't see what's wrong with either of those. They make sense to me as they are, and were even clearer in their context.

how about double-layered pipe, like gas boiler flue pipe?

Sickening how the courts just shrug it off like 'yeah, this stuff happens all the time' as if we should feel sorry for them having to 'deal' with it while they stubbornly refuse to learn any lessons There is a pattern of innocent people being crushed to death. Something is wrong somewhere.

or is the rim so worn away that it is bulging out causing both the brake rub and blowout?

Quick bike question.

I have a bit of play on my drive side crank. Square Taper. Bolt is on tight. Miche Primato BB and XPress Cranks. Which is more likely to be worn? I dont have the tools on me to pull it apart right now.

Is it the BB thats made of cheese or the crank?

Is it the older version of the Miche bb with separable cups on both ends? They have a nasty habit of unscrewing themselves. Symptoms: radial play, either cup showing more thread outside the shell than you remember, vanishing gap between cranks and cups, chainline drifting off, and finally bottom bracket locking up solid as the cups jam hard against the cranks.

^^ but the plastic 'coating' also provides a lot of their strength. Somehow remove it and you'd be left with something not much stronger than takeaway tray foil.

67,745

just 32,255 more needed to get it considered for debate by the back bench business committee.

^ poor manual handling technique. Lift with the knees, not back.

http://www.kinokocycles.com/blog/2013/06/13/trek-project-one-six-series-madone/

whats the deal with the chain wrap on that chainring?

The edge of front dérailleur is holding the chain on the big ring; if you pedalled forwards it would change down. Maybe they wanted it on the big ring for the photo, but didn't actually have the electronic shifting working, so this was the best they could do.

... the necessary tension throughout the stack? Appreciate my terminology here is probably miles-off...

Right idea and back-to-front terminology. You put the steerer and top-cap bolt under tension to create compression in the stack of bearings, headtube, spacers and stem.

LEDs need some kind of current regulation to stop them frying themselves. Coin cells have enough internal resistance to do the job, but as you move to bigger batteries at some point you'll either need to add resistors in series with the LEDs, use higher power LEDs or more sophisticated driver circuitry.

(gah! - tester is faster)

but how would you feel about Minnie Mouse on a banknote? (And who had kidnapped you only to force radio 4 into your ears, and how did you get away?)

It's an interesting one, in that you could see a market for "No part of our infrastructure is subject to US law/based in the US" services, but I suspect the number of people who would move from a free, read by the NSA service to a paid for, private service is so small as to make it a non-starter financially.

You probably won't get much more than a trickle of private individuals choosing for themselves to switch, but companies worried about their business secrets might move, and mandate their staff switch too. And governments worried about their strategic vulnerability might start requiring companies to adopt such policies.

Also i wonder if we'll see a sudden burst of investment in international internet links so that less traffic has to go via the US?

What about #4 which is Britain letting the Chinese government (sorry, Huawei) spy on it by buying the cheapest telecoms hardware they could find and then setting them up a little 'spy base' in the countryside to operate from?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22803510

That's part of the wider picture, and the kind of thing that makes the paranoid part of my mind wonder if there're already more international arrangements in place. (Here, you spy on our companies and we'll spy on yours, then we can meet up at Bilderberg to pass on the good stuff to the business men who keep us in power...)

I missed another (fifth?) aspect of this story: whatever anyone's actually doing, it's clear that it's now technically possible and practically & politically plausible that someone is building Big Brother.

(And a sixth: do GCHQ help the NSA by spying on Americans? (Historically, yes.))

It seems to me that there are three aspects to this story: that the Americans might be breaking their own rules by spying on their own citizens, that GCHQ might be breaking our rules by spying on us via America, and that America is using their corporate dominance of the internet to spy on everyone else, apparently in violation of no rules and in accordance with the principle of 'fuck you if you aren't American'.

Most of the coverage i've seen seems to focus on the first two, but it's the third i find most interesting. How will other countries react to being so comprehensively spied on? Will we see a lot of legal barriers erected to stop movement of personal data across borders to keep it out of hostile jurisdictions? Or treaties regulating bulk spying? Maybe even an international organisation to police cross-border monitoring? Or an international conspiracy of governments against their people? Or the balkanisation of the internet?

And ironic that Obama's spent this week asking the Chinese to please stop using the internet to spy on America...

'Uncompromising' yes, but i don't think brutal quite captures it. It's beautiful in a way that leaves me shuddering and queasy, sick with the waste and damage, and wanting to turn myself in for having watched it.

I agree The Fall is great, but it is so dark; the most disturbing drama i've seen in a long time. I find it really uncomfortable to watch. Kind of feel glad that the writer(s?) and director are getting this out of their system by just making drama about it...

Hopefully something like that gets incorporated into the driving test before too long.

And if they fix that, what about false negatives from bikes the system just fails to detect? If the sensor works most of the time, won't drivers stop looking?

On the roundabout:

Of course the cyclepathist faction are already all over this:
http://cyclelondoncity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/transport-for-london-nails-it-full.html?m=0
http://aseasyasridingabike.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/we-dont-need-innovative-solutions-copy-what-works/

I still just don't like bike lanes, but at least these seem a lot better thought out than usual.

TRL's page on cycling research is here: http://www.trl.co.uk/cyclinginnovationtrials/
and they are looking for participants for their trials.

1. What about all the false negatives from bikes that aren't fitted with chips?