Charles Quackenbush stands at the far end of the platform, away from the crowds around the shelter at the platform steps; positioned well over the tactile paving and the yellow line.

"The train now approaching platform... one... is the... oh nine... oh four... service to... London Victoria... calling at... Herne Hill... Brixton... and... London Victoria."

The rails begin to sing their high-pitched wail. Charles takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. The rain rolls down his cheeks.

And the train pulls up, beside him, past him, coming to a stop twenty seconds later with Charles stood, eyes still closed, beside the final set of doors. The doors open, and the eyes open, and Charles doesn't really have much choice but to step on board. He'll just have to get off at the next stop and try again.

"Any unchecked tickets please," comes an abrupt shout. "Good morning, sir, could I see your ticket, please?" Charles, of course, has not purchased a ticket. His intention had not been to go anywhere today. At least, not via Herne Hill. He pays the penalty fare and is given his ticket.

Charles steps off the train with the few dozen passengers changing to the Blackfriars line, and casually wonders across the platform as the Victoria train continues on its way. On the Blackfriars platform, the electronic display scrolls a long list of destinations for the train through to Bedford, the reflected lights creating a psychedelic show on a warped and battered advertising display case.

"I'm sorry to announce that the... oh nine... twelve... service to... Bedford... is delayed by approximately... nine... minutes."

Two empty paper coffee cups are caught by the wind. They roll around in circles, catch on the corner and break dance through the eddies, colliding, bouncing violently apart, and hurl themselves from the platform edge. Charles sits on a cold metal bench and stares through the rain, across the track, over the scruffy scrub of the embankment, and out to the twin beige concrete tower blocks looming over them from across the road. "Open doors other side," reads a helpful sign placed high on the chain-link fence between the tracks and bank.

"Open doors other side," thinks Charles. The doors are open for the post-doc on the other side of the lab, whose experiments work, whose papers get published in Cell and Nature, whose smile charms committees and conference rooms. The doors were always open for the guy he lived with during his PhD, who, despite his obvious brilliance, never bothered looking for a post-doc position but within a year of graduating had already accumulated an MBA and a small but cool hi-tech company. Or his friends at Oxford -- the lawyers and bankers; and his friends from school, who had travelled the world, published novels, and were already sending children of their own to the same school. And here was Charles, at the end of a second post-doc, penniless -- personally and professionally -- and not a datum that any sane person would want to publish. His career was over. They would make him take the walk of shame.

"I'm sorry to announce that the... oh nine... twelve... service to... Bedford... is delayed by approximately... seventeen... minutes."

Charles sighs and sits back in the seat, folding his arms and tilting his head. And he sees it. The damp mouldy rope, hanging from the station canopy; one end tied securely around a beam, the other looped and slipknotted . Why? What purpose could such a thing serve? Charles stares at it for a few minutes, wondering how strong it might be. The estimated time of arrival on the electronic display revises itself. Charles hadn't considered this method. Hadn't done his research. It couldn't be a bad way, though, could it?

Charles stands purposefully, steps up onto the bench and balances with one foot on the arm rest. He reaches out and grabs at the rope. A few of the fifty-or-so people on the platform notice the performance, and wander quietly and casually away, so as not to see the finale. Charles places the loop around his neck, takes a deep breath, and steps onto nothing. He swings forward, out over the coffee cups and cracked tactile paving and faded yellow line. The rope creaks, the beam cracks, and Charles falls, pursued by the station canopy onto the tracks, knocking his head on the lip of the platform and rolling onto the dead third rail. Somebody on the platform looks up from their newspaper and screams. A distant voice rings out,

"I'm sorry to announce that the... oh nine... twelve... service to... Bedford... has been cancelled."

Charles lies on the track for a while, panting, while the stars fade. His eyes focus on a solitary white flower in the fence. Bind weed climbing the wire links. His phone rings, and he sits up with effort, loosening the rope that still hangs from his neck. There are some "yeses" and "of courses" and "thank yous" from Charles, and the occasional dizzy and vacant nod. An offer. Not science. Something about writing and publishing and online media; a startup doing something new, something interesting, perhaps. Not science, but an offer; an invitation to do the walk with purpose and a destination and his head held as high as a head could be. A fresh breeze blows down the tracks, drying his face. He nods to himself, and smiles.

Charles slowly rises to kneel, rubbing his neck and knees and brushing dirt from his damp clothes. He pulls himself up onto the crowded platform with some effort; the broken section of station canopy clattering after him. He stands there, staring blankly at the arrival of the oh-nine twenty-seven. Steps aboard, still lost in his thoughts, and squeezes himself in, with his feet awkwardly arranged around somebody's briefcase, and his face shoved into the armpit of a Metro-reading old man. Then he snaps back into the world as lightning strikes a concrete tower and thunder cracks. The train slows. "Apologies for this delay, ladies and gentlemen. Due to a broken train at Farringdon we are being held in a queue outside Elephant and Castle."

Charles takes a deep breath of armpit, turns around, and starts pounding on the doors.

I think I've mentioned before that I keep a copy of Burkhardt's Selected Letters of Charles Darwin handy in the smallest room ("for fun"). In this letter to Asa Gray in November 1857, a load is lifted from Chaz's mind...

By the way I must tell you what I heard yesterday, though not in your line, but on subject of the crossing of individuals. Barnacles (Balanus) are hermaphrodite & with their well shut up shell offer as great a difficulty to crossing as can well be conceived: I found an individual with a monstrous & imperforate penis, but yet with fertilised ova; but I did not know whether it might not be case of parthogenesis or a strange accident of some floating spermatozoa. Well yesterday I had an account by a man who, watching some shells, saw one protrude its long probosciformed penis, & insert it in the shell of an adjoining individual! So here is a load off my mind.

On Thursday, I fly off to the temperate rainforests and volcanoes of Los Lagos, in Chile. I and some colleagues will be cycling a few hundred miles up and down the hills, and observing some of the work done by Computer Aid International, a charity which refurbishes and upgrades old PCs for use by schools, universities, and hospitals who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford such infrastructure. Computer Aid's work is the kind of charity work that really enables independent development, personal and national: computers enable education and vital locally relevant research.

As you may already know, I've been raising funds for a Computer Aid project to help the development of computer resources at Nairobi's Kenyatta University, which, already in need of research resources, has been the victim of recent troubles. In light of my own bicycle having had a non-consensual change of ownership while locked outside a pub in Fitzrovia on friday night (for which there is an outstanding punch in the face due and waiting on my desk, if the new owner would like to inform me where to send it), I have decided to embark on a gruelling sponsored challenge. Yes, on monday, tuesday, and wednesday this week, I will be riding the tube to and from work.

This is not a simple and relaxing task. I assure you, it is not going to be a holiday. I will be setting my alarm and getting out of bed a full hour earlier than usual, with no training, in order to stand on a street corner waiting for a rare chance to see the elusive number 3 bus. Should I be lucky enough to find one, I might find somewhere to stand on it, while it embarks on its migration through the traffic jams and roadworks to Brixton high street. There I will see one of nature's great spectacles: the herding of literally tens of thousands of humans. I will get to join them as they surge across at the traffic lights, and then stop abruptly and chaotically outside of my first major milestone: Brixton station. There they will wave their Oyster cards with superstitious flourishes at the automatic barriers, and stand two deep on the one working escalator, reading their free newspapers. Then, for half-an-hour, I will be conveyed in a real historical nineteen-sixties tube train through stations that have been stripped and "undergoing refurbishment" for three years. I will bounce around the carriage, held up by the dense mass of armpits, attempting to read a book. The train will stop outside of Victoria Station, in the stuffy tunnel, waiting for the train ahead to clear the platform. The same at Oxford Circus and King's Cross, where I will finally be deposited in a network of tunnels whose configuration seems to change every week, presumably due to the great concentration of magic at platform 9 � above. The last exhausting leg of the journey is the five minute walk across the Euston Road and down the Grays Inn Road, past the snooker halls and the vomit puddles outside the kebab shops, to arrive at work ten minutes late, despite rising an hour earlier than is usually considered civilised. In the evening I will do the reverse. Where signal is available, I will give live updates on my progress via twitter.

So please, please, please, sponsor me on my great tube ride this week. Just a few quid. A bus fare's worth will help advance humanity. Links and tweets also appreciated. I assure you, this isn't going to me: I'll be paying all of my own tube fares out of my own pocket. Here's how you can contribute:

Make a donation through Just Giving.

or...

Buy some prints.

Thanks.

On my recent post, what is wrong with the scientific paper?, Steve Hitchcock said that the most important problem with the paper is access, and that when we solve the problem with access, everything else will follow. I agree that access is hugely important, I recognise that we haven't won everyone over yet, and I know we do have to continue working away at the access problem, so I will devote a future post to reviewing that topic. But having thought about it a little longer, I am more convinced than ever that it is not access that is the big problem which is holding back the paper and journal, and open access is not the solution from which all others follow and fall into place.

There is one big problem, a single great big problem from which all others follow. The great ultimate cause is not, as I said last week, the journal. It is more basic than that. It is the impact factor. The journal is the problem with disseminating science, but the reason it has become the problem, the reason people let the problem continue is the impact factor. The impact factor is a greater problem than the access problem, because the former stands in the way of solving the latter. The impact factor is a great big competition killer; by far the greatest barrier to innovation and development in the dissemination of science.

Scientists can look at all of the problems with disseminating science, and they can look at us proposing all of these creative and extravagant solutions. They might agree entirely with our assessment of the state of the scientific paper and of the journal, and they can get as excited as us at the possibilities the flow from new technologies. But blogs and wikis are mere hobbies, to be abandoned when real work starts piling up; databases a dull chore, hoops to jump through when preparing a paper. So long as academics can get credit for little else besides publishing in a journal � a journal with an impact factor � any solution to publishing science outside of the journal will never be anything more than a gimmick, a hobby that takes precious time away from career development.

In a worse position than blogs and wikis, where cheap easy products are available, are the wonderful but complicated ideas that would benefit from financial backing to implement � the databases, and open lab notebooks, and the like � but which are currently artificially rendered unviable because no scientist could ever afford to waste time and money on a product that isn't a journal with an impact factor. No scientist can try something new; no business can offer anything new. Even such an obviously good idea as open access to the scientific paper has taken over a decade to get as far as it has in part because it takes so long for start-up publishers with a novel business model to develop a portfolio of new journals with attractive impact factors.

I am not a research scientist. I don't have to play the publish-or-perish game. So I have no personal grudge; no career destroyed or grant lost by rejection from a top-tier journal. It doesn't bother me how much agony, absurdity, and arbitrary hoop-jumping research scientists have to go through in their assessments and applications. But it bothers me greatly that, by putting such weight on the publication record � not actual quantity and quality of science done, but a specific proprietary measure of the average impact of the journals (and journals alone) that it's published in � public institutions across the world are distorting markets, propping up big established publishers, and destroying innovation in the dissemination of science. End the malignant metric and everything else will follow.

On wednesday we all went off to the Royal Institution hoping to see the big fight. It turned out that the fight of the century -- medic, scientist, and Bad Science writer Bed Goldacre versus Paul Drayson, Baron Drayson of Kensington, Minister for Science & Innovation and Minister for Strategic Defence Procurement, on the topic of whether science and health reporting in the media is bad for you -- was a relatively dull and polite affair of concessions and clarifications. It was one of those "debates" that in a large part boils down to a difference in emphasis: for Ben, the daily flurry of embarrassingly ignorant science stories in the newspapers really grates, really does harm, and thus requires our vigilance, ridicule, and correction; for Drayson, it's the really well researched and well written pieces of science journalism that stand out, really educate the public and engage them, and thus require our praise.

It's a shame that there was so much concession and agreement, really, because that overshadowed the fact that, ultimately, Drayson was completely wrong: science journalism is bad for the reader's health. The most important point made during the evening was Ben's reaction to a headline from that day's Express, regarding a cancer drug. Drayson's reaction had been to have his office phone the scientists who did the work, and confirm that the reporting was accurate; Ben's reaction had been skepticism -- not active disbelief, just a total inability to know whether the story was worth believing. And, indeed, a study that he cited found that few people can know what to believe in the newspaper: they get the impression that scientists keep changing their minds -- one week scientists think that coffee causes cancer, and the next week they think it cures it.

So, sure we should praise and highlight good science journalism. But so long as newspapers are filled with so much of the truly appalling kind, the accurate ones are worth nothing: few readers have the background knowledge, access to the literature, or office staff at their command, that are necessary to know which stories they can believe. Pointing at one good science story is not sufficient to demonstrate that a newspaper can be trusted; pointing at a single ridiculously, childishly, fraudulently bad science story is enough to demonstrate that it can't be.

I'm putting the wrong key in the lock, confused by lack of interaction with garden gate. It is, after all, an epic journey from W1 to SE21. It starts at Goodge Street tube, a museum piece of a station, sporadically servicing the commuter this season. You can eat a KFC in the time it takes to descend in the 102-year-old capsule and wait for a train to arrive; in fairness to London Underground, one would still be mid-meal if one had anything more macroscopic than the cute little box of overpriced popcorn chicken offered up next door to the ticket hall. Leaving the excessive packaging behind on the platform, I find myself, quite by accident, on my first West End-Morden through-train ever. So I decide that it might be fun to ride it through to Stockwell and take the Victoria line, rather than changing to a bus at Kennington Oval.

Approaching an hour and an impressive two-and-a-half miles into the journey, I'm still standing on the southbound Victoria line platform at Stockwell. I've been there for twenty minutes, slowly getting angry at the adverts and the people who stand on the yellow line reading the free papers. No particular reason. The electronic display occasionally reminds us that seven of the eleven tube lines will, deliberately, be ceasing locomotion for the weekend. But it shows none of the usual "next train 2 minutes" notices. The platform has filled from half-a-dozen to a hundred or so. I start picking tube-dirt from my nose ostentatiously. Somewhere an alarm warbles. And finally, at ten past midnight, the station master fills the tunnel with noise, the relevant content apparently being a confession to his having lost the train. Half the platform and I give up.

Buses have become poets since they introduced audio announcements for the blind, drunk, and tourist. The one-nine-six to Norwood Junction, the three-three-three to Tooting Broadway, and the N-three to Bromley North, passing Morval Road, Dahlberg Road/Efra Parade, and Brockwell Lido. They can be infrequent and overcrowded, unsafe and unclean; the driver driving without mirrors, the homophobe on the back-seat-but-one, the couple loudly discussing the drunk man two rows in-front, who pretends to read a book, and the crying girl on the phone, telling her father of how she had lost her new shoes. But they are surely lovable things. The rail replacement, the diversion end, the sorry not in service. You can look down on the world and look down on humanity from the top deck of a big red London bus. Yes, once in a while one should stop rushing around and just watch the world while the twelve to Dulwich Library lulls you with Peckham Rye and Lordship Lane: get yer bicycle nicked and enjoy the gentle staticity of London's public transport, where a seven mile journey takes two hours and nobody thinks anything of it.

I think I should just remind everyone that these are just some of my own random thoughts, and not the policy or manifesto of anyone or anything I'm affiliated with...

So in response to the Science Online conference, we've been thinking about the question, "what is the scientific paper?" I already gave my answer to that a couple of weeks ago, but promised to have a go at answering the more interesting question, "what is wrong with the scientific paper?"

I've been thinking through how to sum up the answer all week, and I'm afraid the simple answer is, "the journal". The journal is what's wrong with the scientific paper. Or rather, the journal is what is holding back the development of efficient modern methods of disseminating science. So I thought I'd spend this second post making some observations on what the scientific journal traditionally is and does; what I think the modern journal shouldn't be doing; and a couple of case studies of alternative technologies that disseminate certain kinds of scientific communications better than a journal ever could.

What is the (traditional) scientific journal?

• The journal is a collection of scientific papers limited to some kind of theme coherent enough to make it worth reading buying.
• The journal is led by a charismatic editor-in-chief and editorial board who attract people to publish in the journal.
• The journal is printed on pages. It can do text, still pictures, graphs, and small tables.
• The journal publishes a sufficiently large number of papers to make it worth printing several issues each year, but a sufficiently small number of papers to make each issue manageable.
• The purpose of the journal is to be read and cited by other scientists.
• The purpose of the journal is to be purchased by university libraries.
• The journal provides a peer-review, copy-editing, marketing and media relations service to their scientists.
• Publishing in a journal provides a way for scientists to be cited and credited for their work, based on the reputation of that journal.
• The journal decentralises scientific publishing, allowing individual pockets of innovation within the publishing world, but making change overall very slow.

 

What should the modern journal (not) be doing?

It is perhaps rather foolish for somebody who works for a publisher of journals -- who works developing technologies for a publisher of journals -- to say that the problem with publishing science is the journal. It would be even more foolish for me to say that publishers perhaps shouldn't be trying to fix the problem with technology. Here are a couple of interesting technological advances that the more forward thinking journals have come up with lately.

• At Sci Online, Theo Bloom demonstrated iSee, a structural biology visualisation applet for your "supplementary information". In the same category is J. Cell Biol's DataViewer, which is presented to us as a device for visualising raw microscopy data. Did you know that the results that come out of modern microscopes are not just pretty static pictures, but vast datasets full of hidden information? The JCB DataViewer unlocks that hidden information, by providing it and an interface to it as "supplementary information" with a paper.
• PLoS Currents: all the constraints and benefits of a traditional journal, but without the peer-review. Solves the problem of delays in publication. Publishes items that look just like the traditional paper.

Should publishers and journals be doing these things? When you look more closely at JCB's DataViewer, you find that, useful though it may be, most of its power and potential is currently wasted. The DataViewer is presented to us as a device for visualising the supplementary information of a paper; in fact, it is a potentially important database of microscopy datasets with a handy graphical interface attached. Restricted to a single journal, the database functionality lays unused.

PLoS Currents? This is supposed to be a solution to the problem of delays in publishing special types of science deemed to be important and timely enough to need rapid communication to peers in the field. What have PLoS done? What makes PLoS Currents unique? How does it speed up intra-field communication of those important results? It drops one single aspect of the paper: peer review. In all over respects, PLoS Currents does all it can to make its papers look like the scientific paper, and its "journal" look like the scientific journal. Scientists are still asked to spend hours writing up these important timely results, with an abstract, introduction, methods, results, conclusions and references, with select figures and graphs and tables. Nobody has the imagination to go beyond the paper-journal-publisher. We would sooner give up peer review than publish science in anything that doesn't look like papers have looked for a century.

Or how about Journal of Visualised Experiments? JOVE is, for some inexplicable reason, held up as a brilliant example of innovation in publishing science -- of making the most of the new technology provided by the web. Those who point out that, well, it's not really a "journal", is it?, are chastised for their own lack of imagination. Surely it's those who can't conceive of a publishing format branded as anything other than the "Journal of ..." who are lacking the imagination?

Final example: while thinking about this post, PLoS Computational Biology kindly came up with the absurd idea of being a software repository. NO! Software repositories already make perfectly good software repositories, and there are plenty of them. Trying to turn a journal into a software repository is a suboptimal solution to a problem that disappeared long ago -- long before scientific publishers could have imagined the problem even existed.

Breaking out of the journal

The web makes all sorts of new methods of publishing, communicating, disseminating science possible. It also comes with all sorts of well developed and widely used solutions to the problems of disseminating science. The big old publishers haven't even realised the web has happened, let alone thought about what to do with it. The hip young publishers know what's possible, and they want to be the ones to realise the possibilities. Good on the hip young publishers. But with each new possibility, scientists should be asking whether publishers, even the hip young ones, are really right for the job. Sometimes they are. Sometimes not.

GenBank, the database of gene sequences and genome projects, had to happen. Journals simply can't publish the raw results from a whole genome sequencing project. I don't suppose they gave up without trying. And GenBank comes with dozens of benefits that papers, when spread across a decentralised system of journals, just can't have. Yes, I know that databases aren't the optimal solution for every variety of data, but they are suitable -- desirable; even required -- for more of them than you might think. The microscopy data in JCB dataviewer (or the structural data in iSee) would, I suspect, be of much greater value were it branded as a standalone public database with a fancy front-end, than as a fancy visualisation applet for some scattered and hidden supplementary files, restricted to a single journal.

Like it or not, science increasingly depends on data being published in public machine readable formats. Those who spend their days looking one-at-a-time at the elements of a single cell singalling pathway in every tumour cell line available to them are wasting our money if they bury their data in a fragmented and closed publication record. Nobody reads those papers, and the individual fragments of data don't tell us anything. Journal publishers think they can ensure data is correctly published, but so far their only great successes are with the likes of GenBank and MIAME, where journals have ensured that data be deposited in public databases outside of the journal format.

ArXiV. Does this need any explanation? What does PLoS Currents offer that isn't already solved better by pre-print servers? Just a brand name that makes it look as though it's a journal. If you require rapid dissemination of important timely results and you want to go to the effort of writing a full traditional scientific paper, put it on a pre-print server while it's going through peer review in a real journal. Don't just abandon peer review while making it look like you've just published a real paper in a real journal.

Better yet, don't write a proper traditional paper. If you need rapid communication of important timely results, why waste time with all of the irrelevant trimmings of a scientific paper? The in-depth background and discussion and that list of a hundred references. Put these critical results on a blog with a few lines of explanation, and later submit the full paper for peer review in a real journal.

Credit where it's due

All the real scientists reading -- the ones looking for jobs and grants and promotion and tenure -- have spotted the one great big flaw in all these suggestions: credit. At least a paper in PLoS Currents can be listed in a CV. Nobody even reads blogs, let alone cites them. How can you get a grant on the back of a blog post? Am I suggesting you should be able to get a grant on the back of a blog post?

Maybe. I don't know. I don't think so. At the moment, publishing papers in journals is pretty much all a researcher can get any credit for. Asking researchers to go beyond the paper-in-journal format is going to create problems of assigning credit, and I don't know exactly what the solution to that problem might be. Simply, I haven't put much effort into considering solutions. I'm a consumer rather than creator of science, so that particular problem doesn't keep me awake at night. But there surely are solutions -- plenty of them.

Fact is, it's quite obvious to anyone in or observing science that the current method of ensuring that scientists are credited for their hard work is really quite broken. Trying to cram every new kind of "stuff" into that broken system is hardly helping.

Business models

Meanwhile, the publishers will be asking how we see the business models for these non-journal based methods of publishing working. Frankly, I'm not really interested. But then, JOVE is hardly the beacon of business success anyway. If publishers want science publishing to be a business, they need to find the new business models that work without strangling science. Otherwise, they're liable to find out that, on the web, some institutions and individual scientists can do a better job of disseminating science than the professionals can, and out of their own pocket.

The paper of the future

I don't necessarily think that anybody should stop writing papers -- even the ones that nobody reads. The paper solves several problems better than any other proposed solution. A peer reviewed scientific paper, in a journal if you like, is as good a way as any to provide a permanent record of a unit of science done, and of a research group's interpretation of the significance of that unit of science. And it needn't change all that much. Making them shorter and a lot less waffley would be to my taste -- there's no need to put that much effort into words that won't be read. And give them semantic markup, animations, and comment threads, if you like. But don't pretend that those things are anything more than incremental advances. The real revolutions in the dissemination of science can only occur beyond the shackles of the traditional paper and journal. Every new Journal of Stuff is another step back.

I took the bicycle into the shop today. Whenever it needs work I tend to jump on the train to Dorset, where the service is so much better than in the city, and for a fair price too. The bicycle's getting to the age where a year or two's worth of maintenance adds up to the price of a whole new bike, and you have to consider whether a brand new hassle free machine might be worth the investment. Something more specifically designed for the road, perhaps? Why do I still have a mountain bike frame with a front suspension when the most exciting thing it ever sees these days is the Elephant and Castle roundabout? "I dunno," said Nick in the bike shop. "I reckon it's probably the most suitable gear for the job."

And he's right. The roads of Lambeth and Camden are rougher terrain than any track or trail in the West Country or mountain pass in the Lake District. The London borough councils, it would seem, have gambled all their road maintenance budgets on Icelandic banks, and last winter's frost damage never did get repaired. High Holborn and the Tottenham Court Road tell the stories of ten million commuter journeys, as the buses gouge ever deeper pits and canyons. A mountain bike is more useful in the city than the country. The cracked and crumbling road outside the bike shop tells only the story of ten million pints of milk, bouncing from farm to bottling plant in the tanker. Few buses pass through here.

Nick fitted a new front gearset, and I tried it out. Through the narrow village street and out into the fields. Over the bridge at Bagber, where the banks subside into the Lydden below, telling the story of ten thousand school bus journeys, the driver accelerating down the hill and jumping the ancient and battered coach over the brim and brow of the bridge, as the school children squeal in delight and hit their heads on the luggage shelves. Then up the long slow climb to the wooded hilltop, where fattened pheasants are the only threat to the thoroughfare. Onto the main road again and back over the Lydden at Lydlinch, where temporary traffic lights direct us to the humpback stone half of the twin bridges at Twofords , as the county council patches the cracks in its neighbour -- an accidental story of function and utility, left behind by the Canadian Army on their way to D-Day, and long past its rightful retirement age. And finally, back along the Wood Lane, grass growing tall down the centre of the road, telling stories of children on bicycles and old couples walking with dogs. A seven mile circuit, equivalent to a morning commute up the Brixton Road and over Blackfriars Bridge.

--

The church had an open day, to pay the maintenance bills. The church warden was selling photographs, and the vicar giving guided tours of the tower. The choirmaster served cream teas. I'd climbed the tower once or twice before, as a child, and had even rung the bells one time, long ago. I'd looked across the vale from the top, and down on the field of earthworks where the manor house once stood. But I had no photos, so I thought I'd give it a go.

So I walked back up the hill, past the British Legion's ramshackle workshop where the road narrows and the pavement ends. As children we would stand on the side of the road, where the weeds grow up the stonework, looking through the grimy window at the models of ships and trains and whatever else might be on display that week, before the time when the windows were smashed, and the models were never displayed again. Then past the old telephone exchange, converted into Dorset's smallest dwelling; the new cottages on the old baker's yard, where smashed old telephone boxes and traditional delivery vans once rested in peace; up the steps where the pavement is restrained by rusted railings now replaced in places with lengths of stainless steel; and along the pavement by the old allotment gardens, where ten years ago the council filled the cracks by spreading a thin layer of tar, like butter on a slice of toast, now almost worn through. Where Church Covert cuts through the rooks' nests woods to the churchyard, a torn branch of a tree marks the hole where last I walked this way a great oak post had stood, before it had crumbled to dust and collapsed.

In the churchyard, beside the tower, moles dig holes around the sculpted headstone of the Victorian child, weathered worn and forgotten. Heavy fallen stones, cleared and placed against the building a year or more ago, sink through the asphalt path at glacial speeds, pushing up neat piles of the moss covered concrete before them. In the church tower built from reclaimed manor house materials, Nigel the retired undertaker -- great white beard and best black suit, a medal pinned to the pocket -- winds the weight on the clock mechanism with shaking hands, and the elaborate engineering rings the hour. A few more flaking stone steps and another door too small for the twenty-first century adult opens onto the lead lined roof and through the decorative castellations are my panoramas of the Blackmore Vale.

But panoramas are a different story

Quick, there's still a bit of time left to go and watch The Cell on the iPlayer. It's Adam Rutherford, Nature news and podcast editor, giving BBC FOUR three hours of the history of cell biology. There are three principal reasons why the series was awesome:

1. They make and use a van Leeuwenhoek microscope.
2. Rutherford is an editor and science communicator -- he was a genetics researcher and has left the lab for an alternative career, which he's very good at. But throughout the series he keeps finding himself in a laboratory, with a pipette in one hand and an eppendorf tube in the other, or with a jar of fruit flies or a dish of agar. "I really miss this," he tells us with a great longing and nostalgia.
3. In all of the animations, proteins and other molecules bump around the cell chaotically. Finally, science animation producers have realised that transfer RNAs do not magically gravitate to the ribosome, and cell signals don't strive towards their next relay partner. At that scale, things mostly move around at random, and sometimes just happen upon an encounter that allows interesting things to happen. The Cell is the first time I've see anyone get that right!

So, quick, go watch it while it's still available.

Some of you may have noticed that there is a Charles Quackenbush story at the back of this week's Nature. For those of you without a subscription, why not entertain yourself instead with the second of Chuck's seven miracle cures?

The couple from the Thai stall huddle in their van. The man with the Koftas stands in his gazebo, arms folded, staring through the rain at the Thais. The burritos people haven't even bothered turning up, and the crepes stand has blown over. A man in his late forties, hi-vis Royal Mail vest over his blue shirt, runs across the Farringdon Road, holding a newspaper over his ragged receding hair. He puffs and pants up the cobbled street, between the deserted stalls, and dives into the pie and mash shop. There's a queue, as the usual patrons of the street stalls opt for a lunch inside.

A middle-aged woman piles one-flavour one-size fits all pies and scoops of runny potato onto plates for trendy creatives from the warehouse-conversion offices. She breaks into a gap-toothed grin when she sees the postman. "Alright 'enry? The usual, is it?" She puts two pies on a plate and piles on an extra scoop of mash, winking. "I'll just get you yer tea."

Henry carries his plate and mug over to a long plastic table occupied by a thirty-something man in a designer suit, reading the Independent. "Anyone sittin' there, mate?" He slides into the bench seat, kicking the suited man's umbrella under the table. He pours pepper and vinegar over the mash, and pulls open his saturated copy of the Mirror, spraying rainwater over his neighbour's meal. He settles into a story, picks up his fork, and is about to attack the first pie, when something collides with him.

"Budge up, 'enry," says a younger man in a dirty Royal Mail jacket, dumping a plate on the table, and pushing his way into Henry's seat. Henry moves along, kicking the suit's umbrella some more, eyes never lifting from the newspaper. "Af'noon, Jack," he says. Jack spreads out a Daily Mail before him, half covering the Mirror, and raises his fork. Henry flicks and waves the rival paper out of the way. "'ow can you read that Tory rag?", he asks. "Look at it. 'Dinosaur postal unions vote for more strikes: time to kick these Stalinist bullies out, says Melanie Philips'," he reads. "Yer on the picket line one day, and reading this crap the next."

"Look at yer fingers," says Jack.

"What?" Henry looks at his fingers. Their tips are smudged black.

"Look at 'em," says Jack. "You're ganna get ink all over everyone's letters this afternoon. You can't go doin' that. Nah, Daily Mail's only one what the ink don't rub off on yer fingers."

Henry gives up trying to argue, and returns to reading the Mirror. At some point, the suited man rises, retrieving his battered umbrella and tucking his newspaper under his arm. "Final edition," cries the Independent's main headline. "The brief history of Independent News & Media," announces a side-story.

Eventually, Henry scrapes the last of the ground meat and mashed potato from his own plate, and belches at Jack. "Budge it," he says, gathering up the damp Mirror. As he runs back down the Exmouth Market to the sorting office, battling against the wind, the newspaper is beaten by a gust, torn into pieces, and blown away.

--

A man in his thirties, smart suit and smart hair, wonders through a laboratory, looking like he's putting a lot of effort into not touching anything. "And it was here, at St Bart's, that the discovery was made. Professor Charles Quackenbush, how was it that your team found this, this 'miracle cure'?"

"Well, it was really a large part serendipity," says a forty-something man in a quirky untucked shirt and a neatly trimmed beard. "We found that some of the mice, despite having a gene-knockout that caused cancer, were living full and healthy lives. We were excited that the drug we were investigating at the time was working. But then we noticed that our control animals weren't dying either. It took us a long time to prove that we hadn't made a mistake and we weren't using the wrong animals. Eventually we found what had happened: a few pages of old newspaper had come through a crack in the roof, and fallen into the cold water tank."

Quackenbush continues the story of his chance discovery of the cure for all cancers, before the scene switches back to a shiny studio. "Science correspondent Steve Bartman reporting, there, with more on today's top story," says Jeremy Paxman. "Now, just time for tomorrow's headlines. The Mirror go with that 'Newspaper ink prevents all cancers' story; The Times there with 'Now newspapers are good for you', there's a subheading here 'when will those scientists make up their minds?'; The Sun go with 'Pen mightier than scalpel', I wonder if that one might be a bit lost on some of their readers; the Mail have run with 'Lesbians plot knife crime on Queen says Met Chief'; and finally, the Daily Express were going to go with the cancer cure story, but as we just heard, Express Newspapers have just gone into administration today. Unlucky, there."

--

"Budge up, Jack!" Henry slams plate and mug on the plastic table. "Come on, shift some of this. What are you reading that for? Daily Telegraph? Bit poncey ain't it?"

He glances at the headline. "Newspaper sales up 450%."

"Yeah, I know," says Jack, with a sigh. "I'm tryin' 'em all out. It's a pretty good one, though. 'ere, look, the ink really rubs off on yer fingers." He shoves the palm of his hand into Henry's face. Then frowns. "Shame it's so boring." He drops his fork on the empty plate. "'ere, you can have it, I'm done." He rises, closes the paper, and dumps it in front of Henry.

Henry holds the broadsheet up, gently rubbing the front page headline between his thumb and forefinger. "Daily Mail and General Trust Folds," it says. "Sales of 120 year old Mail plummet." And the story smudges to grey.

Science Online charged us with answering the question, what is the scientific paper? Here is the answer. It comes from the perspective of somebody who has been middle author on just two, but who has spent a little bit of time working with them and with people who think a lot about them.

What does the scientific paper look like?

• It's a few thousand words -- probably between 4 and 15 pages long (but can be <1 or >100 pages).
• It's mostly prose text, with a little bit of graphs, tables, and pictures.
• It has a set matter-of-fact style and structure.

What is in the scientific paper?

• Who did the science.
• Why the science was done.
• How the science was done.
• Data!
• The authors' interpretation of what was achieved by doing the science.
• Pointers to the other bits of science mentioned.

Where is the scientific paper?

• It is in a journal, available in one or both of:
• printed on 4-15 sheets of dead trees, between a pair of glossy (or not so glossy) covers in the basement of a library.
• a journal website, possibly with technology deliberately designed to make it difficult and expensive to get to, probably only available in a clunky and poorly designed PDF file.
• It might also be in-part or in-full in a searchable database, like PubMed.
• If you're really lucky, it is available as HTML and XML.

What is the scientific paper for?

• It aims to be a complete, objective, reliable, and permanent record of a unit of science done.
• It's a way of telling your field what you've done.
• It's a way of telling your field what you've found.
• It's a way of giving data and resources to your field.
• It's a (the?) way of proving to your (potential) employer/funder that you have done something worthwhile.

How is the scientific paper made?

• The authors do some science and write a paper.
• They give it to a journal. The journal thinks about it.
• Peer review! Months of scrutiny, discussion, and revisions.
• Production! The words are turned into PDFs and printed pages.

What is the scientific paper not?

• Part of a conversation.
• Quick and efficient.
• Diverse and flexible.
• Possible to edit after acceptance by the journal (except in extreme circumstances, and via slow and unsatisfactory mechanisms).
• Possible to edit by anybody except "the authors".
• A way of making your data and resources reusable.
• A way of telling the layperson what you've done and found.

Wait, that wasn't really what the question meant, you say? Well, indeed. But before we get to the real questions -- "what's wrong with the scientific paper?" and "what do you suppose we do about that?" -- it's good to define some terms and lay out the basics. Do you think I've got any of my observations wrong, or think I've overlooked some important property of the scientific paper? Do say -- it would be good to try to agree on what the paper is before going any further.

As always, it was great to see everybody at Science Online, and great shame not to have more time to talk to everybody. A Sunday afternoon informal in the park next year, perhaps?

These were the topics that were still stuck somewhere in my mind after all the drinking.

Public relations

I felt the session on public/media relations on the Friday night was notable since it was a bunch of scientists admitting that scientists are part of the problem when it comes to bad science, bad journalism, and poor public understanding of science. Several reasons for this were discussed. There are those who don't know how their press office can help them, and just want to be left alone (see last week's flash fiction), and there are those who know too well what their press office can do for them, and end up hyping their work (can I hear you say "Ida"?).

With around half of the audience being science communicators of some variety, there was a lot of support for more outreach and communication from research institutions. I suspect that academics of the earlier variety will be wondering why their science communicators are helping them write press releases rather than helping them write the paper that will get accepted by Cell/Nature/Science. Both the scientists and the science communicators present, though, agreed that good PR is good for the scientist's career too, and also that it's the science budget that's at stake if science doesn't get good at PR.

Finally, Vaughan reassured us that the arts moan about their PR problem as much as the sciences: PR has a PR problem.

The scientific paper

Ian Mulvany pointed out that last year's conference topic was "what is a blog?", and we seem to have answered that since then. This year's question is "what is a scientific paper?" I started writing the answer, but it turns out that the answer is going to be several posts long. Here are some quick bullet points in the mean time:

• There are actually several questions: what is the scientific paper? what is wrong with the scientific paper? what are we going to do to fix things?
• The publishers and librarians thought that the solution to all the problems with publishing science in the modern world was to make more journals -- the Journal of Stuff, the Journal of Visualised Experiments -- and to increase the range of items that can be called a "paper" and put in a "journal". They're even willing to drop the requirement for peer review, so long as the papers are still being published in something that can be called a journal. I'll argue in future posts that this is the complete opposite of the correct solution.
• We shouldn't blame the publishers for not providing the sort of functionality that requires a cultural shift to adopt, though. Often, the publishers are hugely enthusiastic about new ideas, but they can't afford to go implementing technology and policies that nobody will use and that will drive people away. Either scientists and publishers need to decide to do something together, or some third party has to come and force them to do it -- e.g. GenBank deposition, Clinical Trial Registration, and Open Access.

Author identifiers

There is a problem: our intellectual output is recorded by our names. Our names are not unique, they can change throughout our lifetimes, and they can be represented in a dozen different formats. This makes it impossible to automatically link together the parts of an oeuvre, and makes manual curation very difficult, time consuming, and unreliable. This much was already known to those of us who have found ourselves trying to find the correct email address for a John Smith or the full publication record of a Wei Li.

I was hoping that this session might be a reveal of some interesting new solution to the problem. Sadly that wasn't the case. We heard about Thomson ISI's Researcher ID, during which I drifted off to catch up with the tweets, since I think we're all already agreed that ISI are the last people we want to have control of this; and we heard about Elsevier and Scopus , who don't want to be the people to have control of this; and we heard about Open IDs which solve a completely different problem and probably aren't really a good solution to this one; and we heard about CrossRef, who don't yet have the solution, but it's at least reassuring to know that they're thinking about it.

Jack of Kent tweeted that we should all really be a bit more skeptical of and even worried about these initiatives. Can we be pro-author identifiers and anti-ID cards? I think David raises a good point that people should think about, but that it's a relatively small problem that is no greater than that of privacy on Facebook or your blog. The issues of Author IDs compared to ID cards is like amateur street photography compared to CCTV. This is not a sinister effort to put together a dossier on your academic and online behaviour that can be read back to you when they drag you to the Ministry of Truth; it is just a way to keep a portfolio of your published work that might be helpful to you and your colleagues.

Charles makes coffee. Charles is making coffee, I mean. It's not his job, or the activity that defines his life. At least, he doesn't think so. Others might. Others know nothing about what defines Charles's life. To others Charles is the fifty-something with coffee-breath who gives bad lectures. They see him in the laboratory, they see him at the conference, and they see him sitting alone, with his coffee and his papers. To their astonishment, they now see him on the television. If asked, they would suppose that work defines Charles's life. And then they would speculate about Asperger's syndrome, or an abusive parent.

This is especially true after the television broadcast. Even Charles can't fail to notice them, huddled in groups, muttering, and throwing quick glances in his direction. Then giggling. It all began two weeks ago. "Dear Prof Quackenbush," began the email. "Peer review of your manuscript is complete, and I am delighted to say that we now consider the manuscript acceptable for publication, pending the minor formatting revisions listed at the bottom of this email."

Charles had glanced at the title of the paper to remind himself which one the email referred to. He didn't even recognise the title -- The estrogen receptor-alpha antagonist 1,3-Bis(4-hydroxyphenyl)-4-methyl-5-[4-(2-piperidinylethoxy) phenol]-1H-pyrazoledihydrochloride interacts with Tamoxifen in a dose-dependent and RTK-dependent manner to stimulate targeted nongenotoxic DNA replication-independent apoptosis in human MCF-7 breast cancer cells -- let alone remember reading a draft. But the citation at least told him what he needed to know: which of his many subordinates to forward the email to. Which he did, deleting it as he went, never reaching the end of the editor's message. "Additionally, we believe that your work would be of interest to a wider lay audience, and we would therefore like to issue a press release highlighting the manuscript. If you would like us to proceed with this, please contact our press office..."

The next Charles knew of the paper was a few days ago. He was sat in the cafeteria deleting unread emails on his blackberry while Dan Kendowski -- dull Dan -- talked at him. The heavily fictionalised account of Dan's great oratorical triumph in some conference bar argument about the intricacies of spliceosome formation. Charles repeatedly jabbed at the delete icon. Journal demanding revised paper; student demanding revised grade. And then, something strange. Something Charles had never seen before. "Dear Mr Quickerbash, My name is Susan Barnes, I am Lifestyle & Wellbeing editor at the Daily Mail. I would like to ask a few questions about your recent work on breast cancer..."

Charles was amused, but a little bit excited by the spontaneous interest in his work. He decided to humour Susan Barnes. By the end of lunch Barnes had established that, no, Charles had not invented Tamoxifen, and that, no, a new drug would not be available soon, though Charles was interested in guiding the work through its next logical step, and had some hopes that this would lead down some fruitful clinical avenue one day. Charles explained his work's experimental design, and how, despite their many limitations, cells in a dish could, when used to explore cell biology in sufficient detail, give a reliable approximation of the behaviour of real cancers in real people.

There were only two unread emails waiting for Charles when, next day, he strolled into the institute at his usual early hour. "Dear Prof Quackenbush, Your manuscript is now published and available at...". "Dear Charles, Thanks for answering my questions. The finished item is at...". But they began trickling in at nine, and pouring in after ten. Charles had no time left for humouring people about some paper. He forwarded the lot to a student and deleted them without even the faintest idea of their content.

The telephone was more difficult to ignore. "Hi this is Vicky," said the voice at the other end. "I'm calling on behalf of Peter Rippon." She paused. "BBC Newsnight, yeah? We'd like to do a quick interview with you -- a debate if you like. Everyone's talking about your new book or something? We're thinking you against, you know, oh, what's the guy, Tom something-or-other. The Badscience guy, yeah? We'll send a car. Is four thirty good for you? Hi, Professor Quackenbush?"

Which is how Charles found himself on Newsnight, stammering in shocked anger as Jeremy Paxman asked him, "isn't this all just a publicity stunt? I spoke to Professor Sir Tim Hunt, a world renowned cancer expert, earlier today, and he told me that this drug Tamoxifen is already approved for use and widely used in cancer treatment. He thinks that if patients ever see any benefit from this work, it will be years in the future. What do you say to that, Professor? This isn't really the great miracle cure that you say it is, is it? Professor Quackenbush? Aren't you just giving desperately ill patients false hope by promoting this study? Well you can sit there denying it, but let me quote today's Mail, 'Quackenbush and his team are now working on turning their discovery into a new cancer treatment, which he says he hopes will be saving lives very soon.' How far have you got with this work, Professor? How can you justify saying that lives will be saved at this early stage? People with terminal diseases are going to read your words and think that a cure is just around the corner. What are you going to tell their families? Professor? How can you sleep at night, Professor Quackenbush?"

Charles had stood up, shaking with rage, and shouted about the "arsenumbing incompetence of the humanities graduates in the media". The final footage was of Paxman raising his eyebrows as Charles stumbled towards the camera, looking down at his tie, where he was trying and failing to remove his microphone. "Fucking. Argh!"

They broadcast the whole thing, uncut. Charles was the only person in the institute who didn't watch.

Every now and then one finds oneself wondering, "where did it all go so painfully middle class?" Like when one is sat outside a gastropub in Hampstead eating crepes, or going up to people and asking, "will you contribute to our sponsored bicycle ride for charity?"

I didn't mean for it to happen. I got caught unawares and allowed myself to be talked into it. A six day bicycle ride over 200 miles of Patagonian Andes in September. Volcanoes, lakes, and pacific islands. I mean, the place looks fantastic, and I'll get to spend a bit of Darwin's anniversary year in a region whose geology he surveyed. But a sponsored bicycle ride?

And so now you have to give some money!

You're not paying for my holiday (I am). Your money will be going to Computer Aid, who take old PCs, refurbish them, and ship them off to schools, universities, and hospitals, mostly in developing countries. Did you know that there are some people in the world who still don't have access to teh internets?

We need to raise nearly �6,000 for them still, having raised half of our �11,600 target, and we've only got a few more weeks now to do this. So here's what you need to do:

Make a donation through Just Giving.

or...

Get some prints. For the next month, the proceeds from the photographic prints are going to this cause. You can pick from the complete set of photos.

Thanks!

This is a re-post of something that occurred to me at the Tolpuddle Martyrs' Festival at the weekend, and threw together on the Billy Bragg Forum on Tuesday.

A dozen smiling happy people stand in a scruffy queue. The low evening sun sets a warm glow on their eclectic collected hats and a sparkle on their badges. The red flag crackles in the westerly wind above, and the dead pig crackles in the fire before them. Vegetarians flash their looks of contempt as they battle through the leafleters to the gateway. It upsets their principles to be in the same field as a prematurely deceased animal.

Michael Simmons stands at some distance leaning against a second flagpole. He wears a black woolen jumper and a black trilby. His face is blotched red and white with age and sun. He ignores the passing crowds, and watches the hog roast with little expression on his face. He waits for ten minutes or so before he sees what he has been looking for. One of the hog roasters, a teenager, scrapes around in the great barrel of chips, and walks behind a canvas partition to his van. Simmons smiles a little. The man soon returns in something of a panic. Now a second hog roaster, and older man, with a blue and white striped hat over his grey hair, disappears behind the canvas. He too returns, but in no panic. Angry, surely. Sad, perhaps. But calm. He looks straight past the queues and crowds and stares at Simmons. Simmons smiles, throws the butcher a polite little nod, and casually pushes himself upright, to turn into the setting sun.

Continue reading under the fold...

This is a guest post from my friend Robert Dorking.

As I cycled up the Dulwich Road to Brixton on my morning commute today, I watched as, twenty yards ahead of me, the cheap silver moped crawled out to the right, past the blinking indicator light. We've seen it a thousand times before -- on the television adverts, and on the back of the bus. The forgetmenot blue Micra turned, of course, and the plastic moped crunched. The rider slid and bounced neatly onto the far pavement, breaking a few fingers along the way. The paramedics arrived only a couple of minutes later, but he had already ignored their advice and was back on his feet.

It is my thesis that car drivers are a fat repellent pulsating parasite on this city. These lazy selfish speedophiles do not just make our streets a more dangerous, stressful and all-round unpleasant place to be, they jeopardise the future of the planet as a whole. The problem is so large and so fundamental that it is difficult to grasp the extent of it. Drivers kill and maim nearly four thousand non-motorists on London roads each year -- a figure small enough that, if one prefers to travel through dark tunnels, one might never even have seen one smashed and lifeless body. But it's a figure an order of magnitude higher than those killed in any terrorist assault on our city.

But whether you have witnessed a driver killing somebody or not, you can bet that drivers are intruding on your freedoms every moment of every day. That dank concrete underpass, this rusty pavement fencing, those fifty yards from St Pancras Church to Euston Station that take ten minutes to walk. The still summer days when you wheeze in the smog and the freezing winter evenings when theCharing Cross Road kettles the tourists and touts until everything boils over. The road through the public park, the ambulance stuck in traffic. Centrepoint, Hyde Park Corner, Parliament Square and St Paul's Cathedral, cursed by the car even when none are present.

--

The London journalist Crispin Sunny disagrees with my assessment. He is a champion of this city and a long time activist and campaigner for improvements to its built environment and transport system. He doesn't drive. He cycles everywhere, and he must surely have witnessed the taxi driver who pulls in for a fare without checking what's in the lane to his left. He must have been passed too close for comfort by the great ugly Range Rover that is speeding up the bus lane to pull in front of the car that is stubbornly obeying the limit, just in time to pass the lights as they go from amber to red. He must have been waved through the puddle of blood, glass and oil by the bored policeman while the fire crew cut the roof off the BMW.

But he tells me that my words will be ineffective -- nay, harmful to this cause. My militancy, he says, is alienating the people we are trying to reach out to. Stop calling drivers "parasites", he demands, and start educating them about the need for a safe and pleasant built environment. Eradicating the car is an unrealistic and unnecessary aim: we can achieve a pleasant environment with more zebra crossings and traffic wardens; safety with more sleeping policemen and speed cameras. "Over ninety percent of our city's adult population holds a driving license," he says, "and most of them barely even break the law, half the time. Criticising them for their most valued and cherished possession, the car, and the ideal that it represents, will just turn them away."

I point out that sleeping policemen are ineffective -- indeed, make driving more erratic -- and that most councils don't bother with them these days.

He changes the subject and starts talking about the history of the motor car. "What year was the Model T Ford introduced?", he asks me. I do not know. "That's the problem with you militant cyclists," he says. "You're so ignorant of the historical context of driving. How can you propose to criticise the car when you do not even know how many trim lines were offered on the 1935 Ford Model 48 Roadster? Perhaps if you had ever tried to polish a fan belt, bleed the radiator, or top-up the spark plugs, as I have, you would be a little moreunderstanding."

His driver friends nod wisely. I point out that few drivers would know these facts either, and that it is likely largely irrelevant to their everyday driving experience.

"Not to real drivers," he says. "Sure, an SUV or escort driver might be crass enough to be unaware of the subtleties of his vehicle's history. But a mini orprius, or good old fashioned jaguar driver consider these to be crucial to the understanding of their experience. Volvo drivers understand their importance. You, on the other hand, know nothing of these, and yet you presume to impose a congestion charge, and use fuel tax to fund tube upgrades."

I felt a little bad. When he put it like this, was it really fair to tax drivers to pay for infrastructure?

"You're even ignorant of your own history," he continued. "Cyclists like to think that they are the ethical ones, with their zero emissions and negligiblecontribution to road congestion. But some cyclists break the rules of the road too, you know. Look at you: you still haven't bought a replacement for the front light that you said was stolen weeks ago!"

I had to admit that this was true, though in my defence I protested that it is mid-summer, and so I have done little cycling after dark.

But he continues, finishing with a thought provoking lesson from history. "Hitler was a cyclist," he said, "and look at the crimes he committed in the name of a cyclist society. Stalin, too."

And I thought it about for some time. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps we could all just get along, and seek to improve our safety and built environment together. And then, as the paramedic shone a light into the moped rider's eyes, a southbound Range Rover bumped up over the crashed moped's wheel, buckling it, rather than wait for a clear road to go around. As he drove south, and I set off north for work, I thought to myself, no. Cars are a fat repellent pulsating parasite on this city. Even the ones with perfectly nice drivers.

Afterword: I suspect that this is far less successful than the other pieces of fiction I've been putting together. The accident really did happen, on Wednesday, and I was considering the blogosphere's accommodationism argument (see slightly out-of-date index) at the time, and in the remainder of the journey things blended together to make a great big fail of a metaphor. But which I decided to post anyway -- if only because I felt like ranting about the ugly great parasite that is the car (and taxi). You are of course welcome to comment on where you think it all went wrong -- I'm new to this "making stuff up" business, and here to learn.