So, I entered Kielder about a week ago, and on Monday my son fell off his bike avoiding a white van.

What is it about K100?

Our Nukes are running at a very reduced capacity once again..

Apparently Sizewell B ran at 100% capacity in October.

http://www.british-energy.com/pagetemplate.php?pid=498

Although it was a bit unhappy before that.

I had that last year from cycling around in the cold. Really painful after I got off the ride, then a numbness in my toes. Went completely after a few weeks.

Anyone done this route, any tips?

Make sure you go to the Anchorage at Leverburgh, Harris. It’s right next to the ferry terminal and does fantastic food with views to match.

+1 for proper butcher’s sausage rolls. Our local butcher has big plates of them, wafting out warm sausagey-rolley smells just as I’m cycling past.

Single speed. But you don’t need a beard – a scarf will do to keep your face and neck warm.

Dark muscovado sugar! Yum.

Are Surly coming out with a single speed version?

I didn’t know that either. Can’t say I really care that much. Seems like a waste of neurons.

Will the chainline be a bit off?

Fools and their money are soon parted.

Our first pram was £150 or so. Argos are selling prams for less than that. Car seats used to be about £20 from Halfords.

It turns out that babies don’t actually care, and will survive quite happily in any old pram that’s not actually falling to pieces.

Austin Allegro Vanden Plas. The ultimate in aspirational back in the ’70s.

I remember my dad was talking about getting an estate version (obviously not the Vanden Plas) after his Maxi caught fire and died. My sisters and I told him very forcefully that if he did We Would Never Speak To Him Again. Ever.

So, back on topic, Democracy is a failure due to the debt it creates bribing people?

Didn’t the Romans have exactly this problem under their assorted emperors, who hand out free grain and circuses in order to keep the plebs happy.

So it’s not a problem unique to democracy. And at least with the latter we don’t need a civil war or a murderous praetorian guard to change things.

Anyway, what’s wrong with debt exactly?

+1 for Singular Swift.

Fits your budget. Steel.

Lovely paint job – looks nice and doesn’t rub off. EBB so very easy to set the chain tension up (compared to the On-One horizontal dropouts for example). Comes with a rigid fork which will happily do you for quite surprisingly bumpy stuff. Can run it geared. And generally a pleasure to ride.

Do you have a scale of torture that you would consider? Would you balk at waterboarding but accept a small amount of sleep deprivation?

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

i bet them nipple clamp things would be better than a bit of dripping water………..

Hey, let’s look up waterboarding on Wikipedia shall we?

Waterboarding is a form of torture that consists of immobilizing the subject on his/her back with the head inclined downwards. Water is then poured over the face into breathing passages, thus triggering the mammalian diving reflex causing the captive to experience the sensations of drowning.[1][2] In contrast to submerging the head face-forward in water, waterboarding precipitates an almost immediate gag reflex.[3] It can cause extreme pain, dry drowning, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage and, if uninterrupted, death

Are you sure this is ok?

@surfer – your argument is specious. In the real world, we are never in this situation. It only ever happens in fiction (e.g. “24”).

In the real world, if you start down the slippery road of torturing people “only when you’re sure it’s OK”, you pretty quickly get into a rotten state.

What do you think the reaction of the friends and family of the people you torture will be? Won’t they want to seek revenge?

What effect will it have on the torturers themselves? Will they end up becoming increasingly confused about where the line lies and whether they’ve crossed it?

What do you think other people in other parts of the world will make of it? Won’t they follow our example, but with fewer constraints. They’ll just get on and torture whoever they fancy. And we won’t be able to condemn them.

In reality, you won’t ever save any lives in these situations, but you *will* start down a road to a place that is very hard to get back from.

This is the kind of thing that gets done in our name when we start condoning torture.

Within days of starting his job in Tashkent in 2002, photographs of a corpse landed on his desk. He sent them off to Britain, to be analysed by a Home Office pathologist.

The victim was a supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a fundamentalist Islamic organisation but one that professes non-violence. Murray says: “The main finding was that this person had died from immersion in boiling liquid. And it was immersion, rather than splashing, because there was a clear tide-line around the upper torso and upper limbs and complete burns coverage underneath.

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2005/09/ive_seen_the_bl.html

Jack Straw thinks it’s ok though. Maybe that’s good enough for us?

You’re worrying about definitions of torture?

You need to decide what *you* think is torture. Make your own mind up.

Good grief. What is happening to the people of this country. Is everyone’s moral compass out of whack?

Serious question – what amounts to “Torture”?

Just saw this on the BBC news, apparently our government thinks waterboarding is torture:

A Number 10 spokeswoman declined to comment directly on the claims but said it classed waterboarding as torture.

“We don’t condone it [torture], nor do we ask others to do it on our behalf.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11715577

I think GW Bush is trying to cover his own ass, he actually said his lawyers said Waterboarding was legal, and no I don’t think torturing is justified.

I heard that on Radio 4 this morning.

Seems to me he must have lost his moral compass.

+1 for Cinelli cork.

Is Sideways cycles in Cheshire close enough?

You forget the third option. Energy conservation and accept a bit more coal will be burnt while renewables come on line. Renewables can provide baseload. Tidal. its alkways moving somewhere around are coasts

Sadly I didn’t forget the third option. Good luck finding any politicians who will be interested in that one. Unless you think you can persuade Rupert Murdoch otherwise.

We’ve just had the Severn estuary cancelled as being even more absurdly expensive than Nuclear; again, good luck finding politicians interested in that one.

TBH, we worry about nuclear waste, but we’re all quite happy to dump stuff equally toxic in the third world.

Isn’t the whole point of all the DRM these e-readers have to prevent exactly this sort of thing?

China has just recently overtaken the US of A as the world’s largest energy consumer. Their oil companies are rushing around the world buying up anything and everything that might supply oil. We’re about to find out if all that scare mongering about “peak oil” is for real or not.

And meanwhile, you won’t find any politicians anywhere who will advocate reducing our energy demands.

So we either build nuclear and create a problem for our great-great-grandchildren, or have blackouts and a failing economy sometime in the next decade.

Go 1×9!

Report to police? If it’s on a bridleway it’s still a public road. So surely the usual rules about stopping at an accident apply. IANAL.

It’s been raining hard here in Cambridge, pretty much since the OP’s first post, must be nearly forty days ago now.

The Cam burst its banks two weeks ago, and the centre of the city has been under a lot of water ever since. The water level is quite a way up the side of King’s College Chapel now – all you can really see is the four turrets at the corners, just poking out above the waves.

Most people I know in Cambridge have fled to higher ground – there’s a big refugee centre up in Cambourne, although obviously the river-boat people are staying put. There’s one guy in particular who started building this massive boat a few months ago. He’s been giving various doom-laden interviews to the Cambridge Evening News, but most people just ignore him.

Quite a few of the local cycling routes have become a bit tricky, but we’re now getting quite used to just chucking the bike into the flood waters, swimming across to the next island, and then carrying on. It’s pretty hard on HT2 bottom brackets though – we’re all back to square taper and ISIS. I guess that’s the biggest difference this whole thing has made to me.

36×12

As others have said – you just had a completely crazy gear ratio for Afan (or anywhere with a hill).

Before you go spending money on complicated solutions, just try the simple one. Get a 16t sprocket for flattish places, and an 18t for Afan (£3 from your local bike store) and you’re done.

I’ve ridden around Afan on 32×18 and I think there’s only one or two places I couldn’t get up. Lots of others have as well.

Our greyhound hates it. He’s currently trying to make himself as small as possible next to the washing machine. It’s not even like there’s much going on.

One very small datapoint. I’ve got Middleburn’s on Superstar ISIS BB. They still spin freely after D2D. My friend with HT2 (Shimano XT) said just yesterday that his BB had seized up following the same event.

Again it comes down to “consume less” and “consumer smarter”

Totally agree. Unfortunately, we lack the political will to do this.

Exactly what Spongebob said. Except that additionally, governments are all too wrapped up in economic woes and our (mostly self-inflicted) war-on-terror to care one iota.

Perhaps in a few thousand years time aliens from Gliese 876 will wander around the ruins of our former civilization and marvel at what we achieved, and yet wonder where it went wrong.

He made all his money and fame from microcomputers.

I want to know why he quit that and has been doing this dumb bike thing for the last 20 years.

He’s missed a dozen major revolutions in computing, any one of which could have turned him into a billionaire, and has instead focused his energy on something that is ultimately, just a bit rubbish.

Can you do a scan to see what other access points are around?

That would tell you if the 802.11 layer is working.

If you suspect dhcp, you could try doing “ipconfig /release” and then “ipconfig /renew” in a dos window. It used to make a difference back in the day.

There were some lovely bits when I did the K100. Didn’t have to stop and really appreciate it though.

vlc?

Cambridgeshire county council had a big consultation with footpath and bridleway users to find out what people wanted.

Low impact, keeping the countryside feel, minimal.

Then they got out the bulldozers.