Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
But there are obviously lots of miles driven by cars on roads with few to zero pedestrians AND few to zero cyclists. If you limited it to the kinds of journeys typically made on bicycles I suspect you'd find that cars are much more dangerous than cycles to pedestrians.
And its not 1% more like ~.6-.7%. Even then he's not counting the vehicle vs cycle deaths which is heavily skewed ~100 to 0. Nor vehicle vs vehicle collisions...
Drivers kill ~1700 a year, cyclists ~2.5.
Even the pavement stuff is wrong. 548 pedestrians on pavements were killed by vehicles in between 2005 and 2018. 6 of those were killed by cyclists.
6 is more than 1% of 548. Happy to round it to 1% though.
Cyclists miles travelled are less than 1% of driver miles travelled. Happy to round it to 1% though.
So on a per mile basis then, using your own data, cyclists are as deadly as drivers. And that's with rounding working in favour of cyclists both times.
You really need to remove the motorway miles from this data, since there are (to a first approximation) no pedestrians on motorways.!
Total vehicular miles in 2023 was ~330billion, of which 70billion was on motorways.
Cyclists make up 3.6 billion of that 330 billion, so the potion of cycle miles on roads that might have pedestrians on is 3.6 / (330 - 70 - 3.6) = 1.4%
If cyclists kill pedestrians at a rate of 6/548 that’s 1.1% of the rate.
Ergo, cyclists kill pedestrians at about 2/3 the rate that motorised vehicles do on the raw numbers.
One could reasonably argue that there aren’t very many pedestrians on A-roads either, but given that some A-roads are also ordinary roads in towns I don’t think we can justify dropping A-roads from this comparison.
(We should probably add up the estimates of driving distance for the last twenty years, since we’ve taken pedestrian deaths over such a long period. Feel free to run the numbers )
So yeah, excluding the motorways then cyclists represent 1% of fatalities and 1% of total mileage, to the nearest percentage point.
Hardly hundreds to one as implied by Eabhal's misuse of the figures.
I could make a strong case for removing A-road travel from the vehicular numbers too: Which brings the rates much more in line with Eabhal’s numbers. My point is not to reach a particular figure but that including all motorised vehicle miles when making these comparisons is obviously disingenuous & I think you display your bias by relying on these comparisons. Even when motorways are excluded you apparently cannot resist rounding the numbers so that they appear to be the same.
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
Commons and Lords sitting again for the first time this afternoon. Government benches packed to bursting with Labour MPs unsurprisingly. Father of the House Sir Edward Leigh asks Lindsay Choyle to confirm he wishes to return as Speaker, he affirms he does
Lindsay Hoyle makes a great speech.
Was Cat Smith addressing him as "Lindsay" on the floor of the House during her nomination speech a constitutional outrage/refreshing change.. or has that happened before when the Speaker has still to be elected. I'd have thought at least "the Hon member for Chorley"!!
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
Some point there, no merger but greater co operation at the next GE needed. Tories and Reform combined got 38% of the vote on 4th July compared to just 34% for Labour
It's a grotesque lie about the Holocaust, nonetheless it should concern the Israeli government that they are simultaneously alienating the American left, centre left and now the hard right
Leader of the Opposition Rishi Sunak now speaks following an initial speech by PM Sir Keir Starmer
I know it won't last and this is just ceremonial, but gawd the HoC is better when they treat each other as human beings rather than something they trod in on the Millbank pavement.
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Before the gender-critical PB contributors respond, it needs to be pointed out that Ms Braverman was objecting to the Progress Pride flag (the one with the stripes and triangles) specifically, not the Pride flag (the one with the stripes) generally, and doing so because of its trans association. She is critical of both the theory and practice of trans and this would be consistent with her past remarks. Since PB is - how can I put this - a teensy bit split on this issue, you may prefer to lay off the speech for the moment.
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
It's going even worse than I expected. This country needs a professional opposition to sterilise Labour's left wing agitators and the Conservatives are abdicating themselves of that responsibility.
Frankly, it would be best for them to get the mad right winger in (and out) early. Just get it over and done with and then seek a vaguely electable candidate 3 years before the the next GE.
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
Even if he was right about the numbers it wouldn't change anything. Whatever the numbers were would have been a lot higher if they were not stopped in their tracks.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
But there are obviously lots of miles driven by cars on roads with few to zero pedestrians AND few to zero cyclists. If you limited it to the kinds of journeys typically made on bicycles I suspect you'd find that cars are much more dangerous than cycles to pedestrians.
And its not 1% more like ~.6-.7%. Even then he's not counting the vehicle vs cycle deaths which is heavily skewed ~100 to 0. Nor vehicle vs vehicle collisions...
Drivers kill ~1700 a year, cyclists ~2.5.
Even the pavement stuff is wrong. 548 pedestrians on pavements were killed by vehicles in between 2005 and 2018. 6 of those were killed by cyclists.
6 is more than 1% of 548. Happy to round it to 1% though.
Cyclists miles travelled are less than 1% of driver miles travelled. Happy to round it to 1% though.
So on a per mile basis then, using your own data, cyclists are as deadly as drivers. And that's with rounding working in favour of cyclists both times.
You really need to remove the motorway miles from this data, since there are (to a first approximation) no pedestrians on motorways.!
Total vehicular miles in 2023 was ~330billion, of which 70billion was on motorways.
Cyclists make up 3.6 billion of that 330 billion, so the potion of cycle miles on roads that might have pedestrians on is 3.6 / (330 - 70 - 3.6) = 1.4%
If cyclists kill pedestrians at a rate of 6/548 that’s 1.1% of the rate.
Ergo, cyclists kill pedestrians at about 2/3 the rate that motorised vehicles do on the raw numbers.
One could reasonably argue that there aren’t very many pedestrians on A-roads either, but given that some A-roads are also ordinary roads in towns I don’t think we can justify dropping A-roads from this comparison.
(We should probably add up the estimates of driving distance for the last twenty years, since we’ve taken pedestrian deaths over such a long period. Feel free to run the numbers )
So yeah, excluding the motorways then cyclists represent 1% of fatalities and 1% of total mileage, to the nearest percentage point.
Hardly hundreds to one as implied by Eabhal's misuse of the figures.
I could make a strong case for removing A-road travel from the vehicular numbers too: Which brings the rates much more in line with Eabhal’s numbers. My point is not to reach a particular figure but that including all motorised vehicle miles when making these comparisons is obviously disingenuous & I think you display your bias by relying on these comparisons. Even when motorways are excluded you apparently cannot resist rounding the numbers so that they appear to be the same.
No case for removing A-roads, A-roads have both bicycles and pedestrians on them. Motorways fair enough, but not A-roads.
Sorry but I'm being consistent, I rounded to nearest percentage point consistently even when the rounding was going against my point.
And I think rounding to the nearest percentage point is entirely appropriate as after that it really does fall into the realm of rounding errors, considering we are dealing with such small numbers as well as looking at a 20 year span when 20 years ago cycling mileages were lower than they are today (which hasn't been taken into account) and cars had less safety features than they have today (also not taken into account).
Even if he was right about the numbers it wouldn't change anything. Whatever the numbers were would have been a lot higher if they were not stopped in their tracks.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
But there are obviously lots of miles driven by cars on roads with few to zero pedestrians AND few to zero cyclists. If you limited it to the kinds of journeys typically made on bicycles I suspect you'd find that cars are much more dangerous than cycles to pedestrians.
And its not 1% more like ~.6-.7%. Even then he's not counting the vehicle vs cycle deaths which is heavily skewed ~100 to 0. Nor vehicle vs vehicle collisions...
Drivers kill ~1700 a year, cyclists ~2.5.
Even the pavement stuff is wrong. 548 pedestrians on pavements were killed by vehicles in between 2005 and 2018. 6 of those were killed by cyclists.
6 is more than 1% of 548. Happy to round it to 1% though.
Cyclists miles travelled are less than 1% of driver miles travelled. Happy to round it to 1% though.
So on a per mile basis then, using your own data, cyclists are as deadly as drivers. And that's with rounding working in favour of cyclists both times.
You really need to remove the motorway miles from this data, since there are (to a first approximation) no pedestrians on motorways.!
Total vehicular miles in 2023 was ~330billion, of which 70billion was on motorways.
Cyclists make up 3.6 billion of that 330 billion, so the potion of cycle miles on roads that might have pedestrians on is 3.6 / (330 - 70 - 3.6) = 1.4%
If cyclists kill pedestrians at a rate of 6/548 that’s 1.1% of the rate.
Ergo, cyclists kill pedestrians at about 2/3 the rate that motorised vehicles do on the raw numbers.
One could reasonably argue that there aren’t very many pedestrians on A-roads either, but given that some A-roads are also ordinary roads in towns I don’t think we can justify dropping A-roads from this comparison.
(We should probably add up the estimates of driving distance for the last twenty years, since we’ve taken pedestrian deaths over such a long period. Feel free to run the numbers )
So yeah, excluding the motorways then cyclists represent 1% of fatalities and 1% of total mileage, to the nearest percentage point.
Hardly hundreds to one as implied by Eabhal's misuse of the figures.
I could make a strong case for removing A-road travel from the vehicular numbers too: Which brings the rates much more in line with Eabhal’s numbers. My point is not to reach a particular figure but that including all motorised vehicle miles when making these comparisons is obviously disingenuous & I think you display your bias by relying on these comparisons. Even when motorways are excluded you apparently cannot resist rounding the numbers so that they appear to be the same.
Not my numbers. Just the numbers collected by the police, and relate only to pedestrian casualties on pavements.
Let's go with Barty's per mile analysis. Drivers spend very little time on pavements compared with cyclists, yet cause 90x as many fatalities on them.
Leader of the Opposition Rishi Sunak now speaks following an initial speech by PM Sir Keir Starmer
I know it won't last and this is just ceremonial, but gawd the HoC is better when they treat each other as human beings rather than something they trod in on the Millbank pavement.
Why can't they act like that all the time? When someone has a different view on VAT on private school fees for example, they aren't being evil, they just have other policy priorities.
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
It's going even worse than I expected. This country needs a professional opposition to sterilise Labour's left wing agitators and the Conservatives are abdicating themselves of that responsibility.
Frankly, it would be best for them to get the mad right winger in (and out) early. Just get it over and done with and then seek a vaguely electable candidate 3 years before the the next GE.
"...to sterilise Labour's left wing agitators..." Lol
The country needs a professional opposition to hold the centre-left Labour government to account; your obsession with 'left wing agitators' is irrelevant. Indeed far from needing to be 'sterilised', the few hard left Labour MPs are more likely to be aiding the opposition.
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
Also I'm eating cold roast chicken, ripe Cavaillon melon, and sipping chilled rose wine, as I gaze over the Luberon, and my flint knapping is done for the day. So all I have to do is loaf about, maybe have a siesta, go look at a church in the lavender fields, then drink Bandol
As a man of advanced years, that is close to perfect happiness
You can buy cold roast chicken, tropical fruit and Kylie's finest pink plonk at the big Sainsbury's where you live. No need for foreign travel.
My wife turned up with a bottle of Kylie pink plonk a few weeks back - and it was actually really nice.
A rare example of ‘celebrity drink’ done properly, rather than some random white label Californian crap sold at a large markup, which is what most of them are.
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
But there are obviously lots of miles driven by cars on roads with few to zero pedestrians AND few to zero cyclists. If you limited it to the kinds of journeys typically made on bicycles I suspect you'd find that cars are much more dangerous than cycles to pedestrians.
And its not 1% more like ~.6-.7%. Even then he's not counting the vehicle vs cycle deaths which is heavily skewed ~100 to 0. Nor vehicle vs vehicle collisions...
Drivers kill ~1700 a year, cyclists ~2.5.
Even the pavement stuff is wrong. 548 pedestrians on pavements were killed by vehicles in between 2005 and 2018. 6 of those were killed by cyclists.
6 is more than 1% of 548. Happy to round it to 1% though.
Cyclists miles travelled are less than 1% of driver miles travelled. Happy to round it to 1% though.
So on a per mile basis then, using your own data, cyclists are as deadly as drivers. And that's with rounding working in favour of cyclists both times.
For the umpteenth time, you don't have cyclists travelling hundreds of miles along the M74. You absolutely love the per mile comparisons because it's the only way you can claim that drivers of 1.5 tonne vehicles pose less of a risk to pedestrians than those on 10kg push bikes.
Try working it out per cyclist-day and motorist-day.
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
Well they may not, in which case the Liberal Democrats will take the rest of their seats on the South.
Reform might make progress in the north, but that is more problematic than it seems... Closeness to Russia is not just unpopular...
There were a number of seats the LDs won in the South where the Tory and Reform vote was bigger than theirs, plenty of Southern seats too where Labour were second to the Tories or even Reform were second not the LDs
Leader of the Opposition Rishi Sunak now speaks following an initial speech by PM Sir Keir Starmer
I know it won't last and this is just ceremonial, but gawd the HoC is better when they treat each other as human beings rather than something they trod in on the Millbank pavement.
Aaaaand there's Farage, who needs to get a dig in at "little man" Bercow and how he besmirched the office. Received by a few sharp intakes of breath and not a hint of "hear hear", as it was seemingly not the time or place. He's gonna have a lonely time (probably with zero f*cks given)
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
But there are obviously lots of miles driven by cars on roads with few to zero pedestrians AND few to zero cyclists. If you limited it to the kinds of journeys typically made on bicycles I suspect you'd find that cars are much more dangerous than cycles to pedestrians.
And its not 1% more like ~.6-.7%. Even then he's not counting the vehicle vs cycle deaths which is heavily skewed ~100 to 0. Nor vehicle vs vehicle collisions...
Drivers kill ~1700 a year, cyclists ~2.5.
Even the pavement stuff is wrong. 548 pedestrians on pavements were killed by vehicles in between 2005 and 2018. 6 of those were killed by cyclists.
6 is more than 1% of 548. Happy to round it to 1% though.
Cyclists miles travelled are less than 1% of driver miles travelled. Happy to round it to 1% though.
So on a per mile basis then, using your own data, cyclists are as deadly as drivers. And that's with rounding working in favour of cyclists both times.
You really need to remove the motorway miles from this data, since there are (to a first approximation) no pedestrians on motorways.!
Total vehicular miles in 2023 was ~330billion, of which 70billion was on motorways.
Cyclists make up 3.6 billion of that 330 billion, so the potion of cycle miles on roads that might have pedestrians on is 3.6 / (330 - 70 - 3.6) = 1.4%
If cyclists kill pedestrians at a rate of 6/548 that’s 1.1% of the rate.
Ergo, cyclists kill pedestrians at about 2/3 the rate that motorised vehicles do on the raw numbers.
One could reasonably argue that there aren’t very many pedestrians on A-roads either, but given that some A-roads are also ordinary roads in towns I don’t think we can justify dropping A-roads from this comparison.
(We should probably add up the estimates of driving distance for the last twenty years, since we’ve taken pedestrian deaths over such a long period. Feel free to run the numbers )
So yeah, excluding the motorways then cyclists represent 1% of fatalities and 1% of total mileage, to the nearest percentage point.
Hardly hundreds to one as implied by Eabhal's misuse of the figures.
I could make a strong case for removing A-road travel from the vehicular numbers too: Which brings the rates much more in line with Eabhal’s numbers. My point is not to reach a particular figure but that including all motorised vehicle miles when making these comparisons is obviously disingenuous & I think you display your bias by relying on these comparisons. Even when motorways are excluded you apparently cannot resist rounding the numbers so that they appear to be the same.
No case for removing A-roads, A-roads have both bicycles and pedestrians on them. Motorways fair enough, but not A-roads.
Sorry but I'm being consistent, I rounded to nearest percentage point consistently even when the rounding was going against my point.
And I think rounding to the nearest percentage point is entirely appropriate as after that it really does fall into the realm of rounding errors, considering we are dealing with such small numbers as well as looking at a 20 year span when 20 years ago cycling mileages were lower than they are today (which hasn't been taken into account) and cars had less safety features than they have today (also not taken into account).
That’s 100billion vehicle miles, making cycling 1.8% of vehicular miles on the non-strategic network. So with your approach to rounding (1.1 -> 1 & 1.8 -> 2) that gives us a ceiling of half the rate of pedestrian deaths for cyclists vs motorised vehicles.
Another way to get at comparable figures would be to look at local authority traffic surveys.
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
Well they may not, in which case the Liberal Democrats will take the rest of their seats on the South.
Reform might make progress in the north, but that is more problematic than it seems... Closeness to Russia is not just unpopular...
There were a number of seats the LDs won in the South where the Tory and Reform vote was bigger than theirs, plenty of Southern seats too where Labour were second to the Tories or even Reform were second not the LDs
Just a shame that more of those Reform voters wanted the Tory government gone that were willing to vote for it, given the choice.
I am giving serious consideration on the afternoon thread saying
Suella Braverman is a [moderated] raging homophobe, she's an [word that gets you banned from PB]
Her speech has to be the most homophobic speech from a Brit politician since the 1980s.
She can get in the fucking sea.
Before the gender-critical PB contributors respond, it needs to be pointed out that Ms Braverman was objecting to the Progress Pride flag (the one with the stripes and triangles) specifically, not the Pride flag (the one with the stripes) generally, and doing so because of its trans association. She is critical of both the theory and practice of trans and this would be consistent with her past remarks. Since PB is - how can I put this - a teensy bit split on this issue, you may prefer to lay off the speech for the moment.
(I see it is more international, but is it USA-centric?)
NCC is international. CPAC is more American-centric. But the NCC is mostly the Anglosphere interpretation of national conservatism, which pisses me off because the central Europeans did it for years beforehand and it's one of the most popular political families in the Intermarium. It's a bit like Cook discovering Australia, despite the fact that it was already inhabited.
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
Well if the Grauniad could find eight ‘experts’ willing to testify to a newspaper, how come the legal team of the accused was unable to find any to testify at the trial?
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
But there are obviously lots of miles driven by cars on roads with few to zero pedestrians AND few to zero cyclists. If you limited it to the kinds of journeys typically made on bicycles I suspect you'd find that cars are much more dangerous than cycles to pedestrians.
And its not 1% more like ~.6-.7%. Even then he's not counting the vehicle vs cycle deaths which is heavily skewed ~100 to 0. Nor vehicle vs vehicle collisions...
Drivers kill ~1700 a year, cyclists ~2.5.
Even the pavement stuff is wrong. 548 pedestrians on pavements were killed by vehicles in between 2005 and 2018. 6 of those were killed by cyclists.
6 is more than 1% of 548. Happy to round it to 1% though.
Cyclists miles travelled are less than 1% of driver miles travelled. Happy to round it to 1% though.
So on a per mile basis then, using your own data, cyclists are as deadly as drivers. And that's with rounding working in favour of cyclists both times.
For the umpteenth time, you don't have cyclists travelling hundreds of miles along the M74. You absolutely love the per mile comparisons because it's the only way you can claim that drivers of 1.5 tonne vehicles pose less of a risk to pedestrians than those on 10kg push bikes.
Hardly any pedestrians are killed by aeroplanes, per mile travelled
I couldn't read the whole (paywalled) article but reading what I could see on on the front page image, the headline seems to be typically atrocious reporting from the Telegraph. AIUI it's the economist Tony Smith saying this not Blair and the message is 'unless growth and productivity improve'.
Again, none of this is very insightful - that we face a major demographic challenge is hardly new news.
The report is by Tom Smith, published by the Blair Institute, and Blair is making a speech today about it.
Agree that it’s hardly news that the next few years will be difficult.
We desperately need to find growth - which means building things and creating infrastructure -things that have been blocked for the past decade due to the previous Tory Governments unwillingness to do things..
The unwillingness to do things is as a result of the Process State. When in doubt, add more process. Because it is free* and sounds morally correct.
So, on house building, Labour will come up with a plan. Sounds like new towns are on the agenda. Then they will hit a wall of requirements in law to consider emissions, runoff etc etc. All very vague and poorly thought out.
These will be used to tie up any progress. A large number of lawyers will be happy and the Supreme Court will end up hearing some cases.
*No it isn’t.
Nigel Farage will also be happy when nothing much gets done other than the government getting tied up in procedures, legal disputes snd court cases.
In fact I would go so far as to say that his stragegy for the 2029 election has this as it's key dependency.
I keep saying 'nutrient neutrality' is the killer of development. This not by accident. Hapless ministers might not have realised what they were doing, but there are now hundreds of thousands of builds that are just log jammed stuck because they cant feasibly comply. Another example of the blob, it was spearheaded by statutory consultee the uber-blob quango Natural England, unaccountable entirely to democratic oversite, told planning authorities they mustn't allow developments without being able to show nutrient neutrality.
Can the Labour party really be brave enough to face down the environmental groups?
"Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.”
Wall Street Journal.
The idea that this is all going to go away and it will be business as usual if Biden makes a few speeches without freezing up or trailing off is absolutely ridiculous.
The Democrats are starting to really damage their own brand.
I've long been confident there'll be no return to the WH for Donald Trump but I am now starting to worry. I'll be 100% for Biden if he (wrong-headedly imo) insists on staying in (that remains a no-brainer) but I don't have a vote, I only have a betting position which loses a packet if the (to me) unthinkable were to happen. Sadly it becomes less unthinkable if the Dem candidate is too frail to campaign properly. With that gift, plus a poll lead, plus having both the GOP and SC in his pocket, you have to say Trump has a big chance in November. Eg on the betting, if you compare WH prices and Nominee prices, it implies Biden at over 4 vs Trump if that is the match-up. With the election only 4 months away that's not great.
I'm definitely worried. Biden made sense to me as a candidate because he beat Trump before and has imo been a good president, with an economic record to be envied.
But there's no way his age can't be a big drag now on his campaign.
So reluctantly, I think he should step down, and pass on to Harris. Democrats should unite around the person they agreed should be backup president.
I also think it would give Harris a boost if Biden stepped graciously down and gave her his backing. All the ‘come at me if you think your tough enough’ stuff is just strategising West Wing bollocks.
Keeping Biden at top of the ticket is now madness.
It will not only give Trump 2.0 an easy win but quite probably hammer further down the ballot.
But looks like that is what is going to happen although the ragin' cajun thinks Biden will step down.
Trump wants Biden to step down, he knows Harris is very unpopular in the rustbelt and would give him a Reagan like landslide.
Whereas he knows Biden beat him there last time and the Dems would probably have to nominate Harris if Biden stepped down unless Michelle Obama could be persuaded, who is the only Dem candidate he really fears
Trump beats Biden after the disastrous debate.
Anyone is now better equipped than Biden to beat Trump. Biden should be over already.
Sometimes I think you might be a secret Trump fanboi.
Yes, quite. No way does Trump want Biden to stand down, now
Trump is 99.5% likely to beat Demented Joe. If the Dems get a grip and choose someone else, maybe someone sane and under 90 years old, then it is all up in the air again
The Dems have fucked themselves royally, but it is not terminal. They can still rescue things - maybe - if they kick Joe out
They can still win with Biden, with a bigger post convention poll bounce than the GOP and of course Trump could still be jailed in September.
This is delusional. Look at the polls. And Biden's dementia isn't going away, it is going to get worse - literally, medically and electorally - as the media obsesses about everything he does or says
Swing Vote Americans will think - which is worse, the asshole Trump who nonetheless doesn't start wars, or an actually mad president who might? Leading a party which conspired to hide his madness for a year? And then kept him as their candidate, despite his being mad?
They will vote Trump, and they would be right to do so. Biden has to go: he is certain to lose
Yep.
Dems must steal themselves and stop feeling all protective and nostalgic about good old joe.
He's too fucking old and that's the end of it.
Maybe he’s so far gone he thinks he’s the Queen and needs to keep going until death.
That is definitely the case, ie I reckon he's so demented he no longer realises he is demented, he's gone beyond that crucial stage of self awareness. Which is
1. Really sad
and
2. Really dangerous, for America, and thus everyone else
Worse than that, everyone around him, from his wife and son down through all the staff, depends on his patronage. So no-one dares tell the Emperor himself that he’s not been wearing any clothes for a while now, even if the donors and the media have suddenly started to notice.
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
It's going even worse than I expected. This country needs a professional opposition to sterilise Labour's left wing agitators and the Conservatives are abdicating themselves of that responsibility.
Frankly, it would be best for them to get the mad right winger in (and out) early. Just get it over and done with and then seek a vaguely electable candidate 3 years before the the next GE.
"...to sterilise Labour's left wing agitators..." Lol
The country needs a professional opposition to hold the centre-left Labour government to account; your obsession with 'left wing agitators' is irrelevant. Indeed far from needing to be 'sterilised', the few hard left Labour MPs are more likely to be aiding the opposition.
Eh? I don't think I have an obsession. And we're in agreement about the hard left likely to aid the opposition.
EXC: National Security Adviser Sir Tim Barrow has been told he will not become the UK’s next ambassador to the US, as Downing Street gears up to make a political appointee, with David Miliband and Peter Mandelson the two front-runners
EXC: National Security Adviser Sir Tim Barrow has been told he will not become the UK’s next ambassador to the US, as Downing Street gears up to make a political appointee, with David Miliband and Peter Mandelson the two front-runners
EXC: National Security Adviser Sir Tim Barrow has been told he will not become the UK’s next ambassador to the US, as Downing Street gears up to make a political appointee, with David Miliband and Peter Mandelson the two front-runners
Who'd want it? Four years trying to deal with Trump 2.0??
Assuming he wins and a long way to go yet and even if he does it remains the most prestigious foreign posting with lots of opportunity for champagne receptions with the great and good of DC
Farage wants to p*ss everyone else in the Commons off, that’s his shtick.
It will get wearing quickly.
The last Parliament he got up and made speeches in he ended up taking out a chunk that represented the wealth of 21 of the 28 other nations represented there. Don't underestimate the windbag. It will wear thin amongst parliamentarians, but less so voters.
Farage now speaks to the Commons for the first time and congratulates Hoyle while hitting out at Bercow
And watch the media fawn over him
Been a problem for a while now. I expect he’ll have a permanent spot on Question Time. Although the producers might be a bit more aware of Davey, and what he might do on air!
EXC: National Security Adviser Sir Tim Barrow has been told he will not become the UK’s next ambassador to the US, as Downing Street gears up to make a political appointee, with David Miliband and Peter Mandelson the two front-runners
Who'd want it? Four years trying to deal with Trump 2.0??
Assuming he wins and a long way to go yet and even if he does it remains the most prestigious foreign posting with lots of opportunity for champagne receptions with the great and good of DC
'opportunity for champagne receptions with the great and good of DC'
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
But there are obviously lots of miles driven by cars on roads with few to zero pedestrians AND few to zero cyclists. If you limited it to the kinds of journeys typically made on bicycles I suspect you'd find that cars are much more dangerous than cycles to pedestrians.
And its not 1% more like ~.6-.7%. Even then he's not counting the vehicle vs cycle deaths which is heavily skewed ~100 to 0. Nor vehicle vs vehicle collisions...
Drivers kill ~1700 a year, cyclists ~2.5.
Even the pavement stuff is wrong. 548 pedestrians on pavements were killed by vehicles in between 2005 and 2018. 6 of those were killed by cyclists.
6 is more than 1% of 548. Happy to round it to 1% though.
Cyclists miles travelled are less than 1% of driver miles travelled. Happy to round it to 1% though.
So on a per mile basis then, using your own data, cyclists are as deadly as drivers. And that's with rounding working in favour of cyclists both times.
For the umpteenth time, you don't have cyclists travelling hundreds of miles along the M74. You absolutely love the per mile comparisons because it's the only way you can claim that drivers of 1.5 tonne vehicles pose less of a risk to pedestrians than those on 10kg push bikes.
Hardly any pedestrians are killed by aeroplanes, per mile travelled
EXC: National Security Adviser Sir Tim Barrow has been told he will not become the UK’s next ambassador to the US, as Downing Street gears up to make a political appointee, with David Miliband and Peter Mandelson the two front-runners
Who'd want it? Four years trying to deal with Trump 2.0??
Assuming he wins and a long way to go yet and even if he does it remains the most prestigious foreign posting with lots of opportunity for champagne receptions with the great and good of DC
Considering our relationship with the US I would have hoped that a former national security adviser would be a better selection as ambassador to be understanding the geopolitical and security issues that are key to the relationship - more so than a Labour placeman to go to champagne receptions.
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
Some point there, no merger but greater co operation at the next GE needed. Tories and Reform combined got 38% of the vote on 4th July compared to just 34% for Labour
CHB said it better than I.
That doesn’t work and you know it. If it did you could add Green to Labour, and where do the LDs fit?
Leader of the Opposition Rishi Sunak now speaks following an initial speech by PM Sir Keir Starmer
I know it won't last and this is just ceremonial, but gawd the HoC is better when they treat each other as human beings rather than something they trod in on the Millbank pavement.
Aaaaand there's Farage, who needs to get a dig in at "little man" Bercow and how he besmirched the office. Received by a few sharp intakes of breath and not a hint of "hear hear", as it was seemingly not the time or place. He's gonna have a lonely time (probably with zero f*cks given)
The dig at Bercow and the call-back to Brexit will, Farage hopes, harvest the likes and attention he is after on social media.
More than most MPs he will be speaking to an audience outside the chamber. I'm sure he's going to try and pick some arguments with other MPs, having started with someone not in Parliament.
EXC: National Security Adviser Sir Tim Barrow has been told he will not become the UK’s next ambassador to the US, as Downing Street gears up to make a political appointee, with David Miliband and Peter Mandelson the two front-runners
Terrible, at least IDS was re elected and can now reintroduce his death by dangerous cycling bill into Parliament as a private member's bill
I’ve cycled along many tow paths. I just can’t imagine doing the speed that would catapult someone you hit into the air. They are all mixed use.
I'd be interested in the physics that could send someone airborne from a cycling collision. What speed? How would you generate upwards force given your high centre if gravity?
I can imagine if the cyclist swerves to avoid, they are no longer vertical, and the bottom of their wheel takes out the pedestrian's legs, catapulting them. P'haps.
Reading it, it sounds like a typical inelastic collision so a simple momentum transfer gives some indication.
Assuming the mass of the bike is 10kg = 100N, the rider is 100kg = 1000N, the woman 55kg = 550n and that he was riding reasonably quickly (say 15mph = 7½ m/s) then the velocity of the woman after the collision would be
(100 + 1000) / 550 * 7.5 = 15m/s or approx 30 mph
She might as well have been hit by a car.
15mph is v. fast for someone cycling on a towpath. That’s the maximum legal speed for e-bike assistance.
It would be unlikely they were going that quickly. I have seen the occasional eejit on the Oxford towpath going far too fast so I wouldn’t put it beyond the bounds of possibility but those individuals make up a tiny minority of towpath cyclists in my experience.
Mmm, 15mph seemed like a very high figure to me too. On the other hand the number of cyclists who actually knock somebody over, let alone kill them, is also a tiny minority. If it was 15mph then I would expect that to feature in the prosecution case as clearly excessive, but the Mail doesn't mention speed. Might just be crap reporting, of course..
Thankfully the roads in the UK are pretty safe and the number of drivers and the number of cyclists who actually knock anyone over, let alone kill them, is a tiny minority either way.
Interestingly, proportionately per vehicle/bike per mile, it seems that cycles and cars are about exactly as dangerous as each other to pedestrians. I'm not sure why that is considering vehicles are heavier you'd think they'd be more dangerous but they're not? Perhaps because cyclists are more likely to ride on the pavement so increasing the risk to pedestrians.
Citation? Maybe you are including roads where neither pedestrians nor cyclists are allowed?
1% of pedestrian fatalities are by cyclists.
However cyclists make up less than 1% of the miles travelled that cars do.
So per mile, they're roughly equivalent to each other.
But there are obviously lots of miles driven by cars on roads with few to zero pedestrians AND few to zero cyclists. If you limited it to the kinds of journeys typically made on bicycles I suspect you'd find that cars are much more dangerous than cycles to pedestrians.
And its not 1% more like ~.6-.7%. Even then he's not counting the vehicle vs cycle deaths which is heavily skewed ~100 to 0. Nor vehicle vs vehicle collisions...
Drivers kill ~1700 a year, cyclists ~2.5.
Even the pavement stuff is wrong. 548 pedestrians on pavements were killed by vehicles in between 2005 and 2018. 6 of those were killed by cyclists.
6 is more than 1% of 548. Happy to round it to 1% though.
Cyclists miles travelled are less than 1% of driver miles travelled. Happy to round it to 1% though.
So on a per mile basis then, using your own data, cyclists are as deadly as drivers. And that's with rounding working in favour of cyclists both times.
For the umpteenth time, you don't have cyclists travelling hundreds of miles along the M74. You absolutely love the per mile comparisons because it's the only way you can claim that drivers of 1.5 tonne vehicles pose less of a risk to pedestrians than those on 10kg push bikes.
Hardly any pedestrians are killed by aeroplanes, per mile travelled
Quite a few drivers though, if you consider what happened at Shoreham
Farage now speaks to the Commons for the first time and congratulates Hoyle while hitting out at Bercow
And watch the media fawn over him
Been a problem for a while now. I expect he’ll have a permanent spot on Question Time. Although the producers might be a bit more aware of Davey, and what he might do on air!
I wonder if Davey will be campaigning for lower insurance premiums?
Michelle Obama is never, will never and has never wanted or is going to run this electoral cycle. She is one of those that needs to have been deepest red in anyone's book.
But preferably at 20 not 120.
She's taken over from Hillary Clinton as the David Miliband of the market - doubtless she'll shorten up next presidential cycle too.
Yes. This was a bit more than that though. 120 into 12 with decent liquidity. I doubt we'll see that again. It's because of these particular and peculiar circs, the horror of Trump, Biden's health and disapprovals.
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
Well if the Grauniad could find eight ‘experts’ willing to testify to a newspaper, how come the legal team of the accused was unable to find any to testify at the trial?
You should perhaps be asking that same question about every previous miscarriage of justice where the court relied on flawed medical or statistical evidence & the defence failed to challenge it effectively at the original trial.
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
Some point there, no merger but greater co operation at the next GE needed. Tories and Reform combined got 38% of the vote on 4th July compared to just 34% for Labour
But when Reform voters were asked their second choice, only a third said the Tories.
Almost as many said Lab/LD/Green.
Farage himself said it was different to 2019, and he couldn't deliver Reform voters to the Tories, even if he stood down.
Even if a lot of Reform 24 turn out to be Tory 19, we need to remember that the Tories in 19 were the Get Brexit Done coalition that took the Red Wall. There might be a right wing coalition on some issues, but without something as big as Brexit, Reform voters aren't going to move as a block to an economically right wing Tory party.
I couldn't read the whole (paywalled) article but reading what I could see on on the front page image, the headline seems to be typically atrocious reporting from the Telegraph. AIUI it's the economist Tony Smith saying this not Blair and the message is 'unless growth and productivity improve'.
Again, none of this is very insightful - that we face a major demographic challenge is hardly new news.
The report is by Tom Smith, published by the Blair Institute, and Blair is making a speech today about it.
Agree that it’s hardly news that the next few years will be difficult.
We desperately need to find growth - which means building things and creating infrastructure -things that have been blocked for the past decade due to the previous Tory Governments unwillingness to do things..
The unwillingness to do things is as a result of the Process State. When in doubt, add more process. Because it is free* and sounds morally correct.
So, on house building, Labour will come up with a plan. Sounds like new towns are on the agenda. Then they will hit a wall of requirements in law to consider emissions, runoff etc etc. All very vague and poorly thought out.
These will be used to tie up any progress. A large number of lawyers will be happy and the Supreme Court will end up hearing some cases.
*No it isn’t.
Nigel Farage will also be happy when nothing much gets done other than the government getting tied up in procedures, legal disputes snd court cases.
In fact I would go so far as to say that his stragegy for the 2029 election has this as it's key dependency.
I keep saying 'nutrient neutrality' is the killer of development. This not by accident. Hapless ministers might not have realised what they were doing, but there are now hundreds of thousands of builds that are just log jammed stuck because they cant feasibly comply. Another example of the blob, it was spearheaded by statutory consultee the uber-blob quango Natural England, unaccountable entirely to democratic oversite, told planning authorities they mustn't allow developments without being able to show nutrient neutrality.
Can the Labour party really be brave enough to face down the environmental groups?
The irony here is the main cause of nutrient runoff into the rivers is farming isn‘t it?
But we can’t go after the farmers - that’s far too politically challenging. Much better to go after the politically less well connected house building industry.
Farage wants to p*ss everyone else in the Commons off, that’s his shtick.
It will get wearing quickly.
The last Parliament he got up and made speeches in he ended up taking out a chunk that represented the wealth of 21 of the 28 other nations represented there. Don't underestimate the windbag. It will wear thin amongst parliamentarians, but less so voters.
Because whatever happens, Farage will make himself a story. If he can play the victim - warranted or unwarranted - all the better.
It's not about the good of the country. It's about him.
Not surprised you've already noticed the improvement. The grown-ups are back in charge now.
I thought the whole point of getting Starmer in was to get rid of the criminals and sociopaths.
Tony is neither a criminal nor a sociopath. What he is, is highly experienced, having run the best government of the last many decades.
Hahahahaha. I am sure you believe that as you have shown a similar level of naivity in the past. Blair was just as crooked and sociopathic as the Johnson. The only difference is he was better at it.
Do you want your sociopaths to be stupid or clever. I would suggest that the clever sociopath is far more dangerous than the stupid one.
I do believe Tony was a much better PM than Johnson yes, just based on outcomes.
Lowest NHS waiting times in history and highest NHS satisfaction, Johnson partied through COVID.
Please don't condescend me.
When you make such daft statements you deserve all the condescension I can muster.
Michelle Obama is never, will never and has never wanted or is going to run this electoral cycle. She is one of those that needs to have been deepest red in anyone's book.
But preferably at 20 not 120.
Michelle Obama 33.12 £33.32
Btw If anyone fancies a humungous payout with a black swan event & has the liquidity (And isn't premium charged) you could lay Trump at 1.61 for the presidency and back the GOP at the same price.
That's not the worst bet in the world - things can happen around Trump.
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
Well if the Grauniad could find eight ‘experts’ willing to testify to a newspaper, how come the legal team of the accused was unable to find any to testify at the trial?
You should perhaps be asking that same question about every previous miscarriage of justice where the court relied on flawed medical or statistical evidence & the defence failed to challenge it effectively at the original trial.
The justice system does this over & over again.
Thankfully the British justice system learned a lot from the case of Sally Clark, and at Letby’s first trial introduced a number of statisticians as expert witnesses, to make very clear to the jury that this was not a recurrence of that miscarriage of justice.
A minor point in the endless discussion about Biden: There are American politicians older than he, who are still competent, notably Chuck Grassley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Grassley
I couldn't read the whole (paywalled) article but reading what I could see on on the front page image, the headline seems to be typically atrocious reporting from the Telegraph. AIUI it's the economist Tony Smith saying this not Blair and the message is 'unless growth and productivity improve'.
Again, none of this is very insightful - that we face a major demographic challenge is hardly new news.
The report is by Tom Smith, published by the Blair Institute, and Blair is making a speech today about it.
Agree that it’s hardly news that the next few years will be difficult.
We desperately need to find growth - which means building things and creating infrastructure -things that have been blocked for the past decade due to the previous Tory Governments unwillingness to do things..
The unwillingness to do things is as a result of the Process State. When in doubt, add more process. Because it is free* and sounds morally correct.
So, on house building, Labour will come up with a plan. Sounds like new towns are on the agenda. Then they will hit a wall of requirements in law to consider emissions, runoff etc etc. All very vague and poorly thought out.
These will be used to tie up any progress. A large number of lawyers will be happy and the Supreme Court will end up hearing some cases.
*No it isn’t.
Nigel Farage will also be happy when nothing much gets done other than the government getting tied up in procedures, legal disputes snd court cases.
In fact I would go so far as to say that his stragegy for the 2029 election has this as it's key dependency.
I keep saying 'nutrient neutrality' is the killer of development. This not by accident. Hapless ministers might not have realised what they were doing, but there are now hundreds of thousands of builds that are just log jammed stuck because they cant feasibly comply. Another example of the blob, it was spearheaded by statutory consultee the uber-blob quango Natural England, unaccountable entirely to democratic oversite, told planning authorities they mustn't allow developments without being able to show nutrient neutrality.
Can the Labour party really be brave enough to face down the environmental groups?
The irony here is the main cause of nutrient runoff into the rivers is farming isn‘t it?
But we can’t go after the farmers - that’s far too politically challenging. Much better to go after the politically less well connected house building industry.
Do you exaggerate the landowner connections of Labour?
The NFU and the CLA may try their best, but I don't think Mr Starmer and friends are in their pocket to the same extent as eg Therese Coffey.
I couldn't read the whole (paywalled) article but reading what I could see on on the front page image, the headline seems to be typically atrocious reporting from the Telegraph. AIUI it's the economist Tony Smith saying this not Blair and the message is 'unless growth and productivity improve'.
Again, none of this is very insightful - that we face a major demographic challenge is hardly new news.
The report is by Tom Smith, published by the Blair Institute, and Blair is making a speech today about it.
Agree that it’s hardly news that the next few years will be difficult.
We desperately need to find growth - which means building things and creating infrastructure -things that have been blocked for the past decade due to the previous Tory Governments unwillingness to do things..
The unwillingness to do things is as a result of the Process State. When in doubt, add more process. Because it is free* and sounds morally correct.
So, on house building, Labour will come up with a plan. Sounds like new towns are on the agenda. Then they will hit a wall of requirements in law to consider emissions, runoff etc etc. All very vague and poorly thought out.
These will be used to tie up any progress. A large number of lawyers will be happy and the Supreme Court will end up hearing some cases.
*No it isn’t.
Nigel Farage will also be happy when nothing much gets done other than the government getting tied up in procedures, legal disputes snd court cases.
In fact I would go so far as to say that his stragegy for the 2029 election has this as it's key dependency.
I keep saying 'nutrient neutrality' is the killer of development. This not by accident. Hapless ministers might not have realised what they were doing, but there are now hundreds of thousands of builds that are just log jammed stuck because they cant feasibly comply. Another example of the blob, it was spearheaded by statutory consultee the uber-blob quango Natural England, unaccountable entirely to democratic oversite, told planning authorities they mustn't allow developments without being able to show nutrient neutrality.
Can the Labour party really be brave enough to face down the environmental groups?
The irony here is the main cause of nutrient runoff into the rivers is farming isn‘t it?
But we can’t go after the farmers - that’s far too politically challenging. Much better to go after the politically less well connected house building industry.
Do you exaggerate the landowner connections of Labour?
The NFU and the CLA may try their best, but I don't think Mr Starmer and friends are in their pocket to the same extent as eg Theresa Coffey.
I was thinking of the Quango that pushed for these regulations to be introduced when I wrote that - apologies for the ambiguity!
I couldn't read the whole (paywalled) article but reading what I could see on on the front page image, the headline seems to be typically atrocious reporting from the Telegraph. AIUI it's the economist Tony Smith saying this not Blair and the message is 'unless growth and productivity improve'.
Again, none of this is very insightful - that we face a major demographic challenge is hardly new news.
The report is by Tom Smith, published by the Blair Institute, and Blair is making a speech today about it.
Agree that it’s hardly news that the next few years will be difficult.
We desperately need to find growth - which means building things and creating infrastructure -things that have been blocked for the past decade due to the previous Tory Governments unwillingness to do things..
The unwillingness to do things is as a result of the Process State. When in doubt, add more process. Because it is free* and sounds morally correct.
So, on house building, Labour will come up with a plan. Sounds like new towns are on the agenda. Then they will hit a wall of requirements in law to consider emissions, runoff etc etc. All very vague and poorly thought out.
These will be used to tie up any progress. A large number of lawyers will be happy and the Supreme Court will end up hearing some cases.
*No it isn’t.
Nigel Farage will also be happy when nothing much gets done other than the government getting tied up in procedures, legal disputes snd court cases.
In fact I would go so far as to say that his stragegy for the 2029 election has this as it's key dependency.
I keep saying 'nutrient neutrality' is the killer of development. This not by accident. Hapless ministers might not have realised what they were doing, but there are now hundreds of thousands of builds that are just log jammed stuck because they cant feasibly comply. Another example of the blob, it was spearheaded by statutory consultee the uber-blob quango Natural England, unaccountable entirely to democratic oversite, told planning authorities they mustn't allow developments without being able to show nutrient neutrality.
Can the Labour party really be brave enough to face down the environmental groups?
The irony here is the main cause of nutrient runoff into the rivers is farming isn‘t it?
But we can’t go after the farmers - that’s far too politically challenging. Much better to go after the politically less well connected house building industry.
You think farmers have more political clout than housebuilders?
Not surprised you've already noticed the improvement. The grown-ups are back in charge now.
I thought the whole point of getting Starmer in was to get rid of the criminals and sociopaths.
Tony is neither a criminal nor a sociopath. What he is, is highly experienced, having run the best government of the last many decades.
Hahahahaha. I am sure you believe that as you have shown a similar level of naivity in the past. Blair was just as crooked and sociopathic as the Johnson. The only difference is he was better at it.
Do you want your sociopaths to be stupid or clever. I would suggest that the clever sociopath is far more dangerous than the stupid one.
I do believe Tony was a much better PM than Johnson yes, just based on outcomes.
Lowest NHS waiting times in history and highest NHS satisfaction, Johnson partied through COVID.
Please don't condescend me.
When you make such daft statements you deserve all the condescension I can muster.
He’s right, though. If a little over-enthusiastic.
I agree with you about the serious problems there are (the Post Offices cases are notable, but others too) but that does not mean this case is one of them. Lots of people are found guilty because they are. At the moment a serious analysis would be needed covering the totality of the evidence, of which there are numerous strands. Note that on the second trial Letby chose to use the same lawyers. She did not have to.
The thought that her lawyers had expert exculpatory evidence which they didn't use because they were dim is to say the least in this case unlikely.
Of course this case could run and run. Maybe a new set of lawyers will be instructed and bring stuff to the attention of the CCRC. Until we are well into that process I think the matter stands where it did.
I’m sure the lawyers are very intelligent people. But that doesn’t prevent them being ignorant of statistics.
How many lawyers did A-level mathematics? Almost none & even that course contains only the barest introduction to a very complex topic.
If you are unaware that there’s a problem with the prosecution case, you won’t even conceive of challenging it in the first place. Or you may (reasonably) believe that you will be unable to communicate those problems to a jury that is instructed to see things through a lens of “expert vs expert”.
This is a problem with the expert witness system as a whole, not with individual lawyers.
& it’s not surprising that Letby used the original lawyers for her appeal. Who else could she possible choose? How would she know that they were any better than the original ones if she did try and change her legal team? (Would she even be permitted to do so given that the country is paying for her legal representation?)
Again, Letby may well be guilty (I hope she confesses in prison if so - it would be an act of kindness to everyone involved) but the case against her bears much in common with past miscarriages of justice. It’s not surprising that people are sceptical about it.
"How many lawyers did A-level mathematics? Almost none & even that course contains only the barest introduction to a very complex topic."
Note that in court contest re: result of 2024 Governor's race in WA State, the lead attorney for the Democrats had both a law degree AND a mathematics degree, both from Harvard.
His math skills proved VERY useful in understanding basics about an election race / court contest which concluded with Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire beating her Republican opponent by margin of +133 votes out of more than 2.8 million cast.
Farage wants to p*ss everyone else in the Commons off, that’s his shtick.
It will get wearing quickly.
The last Parliament he got up and made speeches in he ended up taking out a chunk that represented the wealth of 21 of the 28 other nations represented there. Don't underestimate the windbag. It will wear thin amongst parliamentarians, but less so voters.
I think you mean economic output - or GDP - not wealth.
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
Well if the Grauniad could find eight ‘experts’ willing to testify to a newspaper, how come the legal team of the accused was unable to find any to testify at the trial?
You should perhaps be asking that same question about every previous miscarriage of justice where the court relied on flawed medical or statistical evidence & the defence failed to challenge it effectively at the original trial.
The justice system does this over & over again.
Thankfully the British justice system learned a lot from the case of Sally Clark, and at Letby’s first trial introduced a number of statisticians as expert witnesses, to make very clear to the jury that this was not a recurrence of that miscarriage of justice.
Because there are no other statistical errors one could make except the one made in the Sally Clarke case, obviously?
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
Well if the Grauniad could find eight ‘experts’ willing to testify to a newspaper, how come the legal team of the accused was unable to find any to testify at the trial?
You should perhaps be asking that same question about every previous miscarriage of justice where the court relied on flawed medical or statistical evidence & the defence failed to challenge it effectively at the original trial.
The justice system does this over & over again.
Thankfully the British justice system learned a lot from the case of Sally Clark, and at Letby’s first trial introduced a number of statisticians as expert witnesses, to make very clear to the jury that this was not a recurrence of that miscarriage of justice.
Can you give a source for that? The judgment rejecting the application for permission to appeal gives what looks like an exhaustive list of prosecution experts
Dr Evans advised the police on the instruction of experts from specific specialisations and further experts were instructed and provided reports as set out below: i) Dr Andreas Marnerides, forensic pathologist and histopathologist; ii) Professor Owen Arthurs, consultant paediatric radiologist; iii) Professor Sally Kinsey, consultant paediatric haematologist; iv) Professor Peter Hindmarsh, consultant paediatric endocrinologist; v) Professor Stavros Stivaros, consultant paediatric neuroradiologist; vi) Dr Simon Kenney, consultant paediatric surgeon.
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
Well if the Grauniad could find eight ‘experts’ willing to testify to a newspaper, how come the legal team of the accused was unable to find any to testify at the trial?
You should perhaps be asking that same question about every previous miscarriage of justice where the court relied on flawed medical or statistical evidence & the defence failed to challenge it effectively at the original trial.
The justice system does this over & over again.
Thankfully the British justice system learned a lot from the case of Sally Clark, and at Letby’s first trial introduced a number of statisticians as expert witnesses, to make very clear to the jury that this was not a recurrence of that miscarriage of justice.
Can you give a source for that? The judgment rejecting the application for permission to appeal gives what looks like an exhaustive list of prosecution experts
Dr Evans advised the police on the instruction of experts from specific specialisations and further experts were instructed and provided reports as set out below: i) Dr Andreas Marnerides, forensic pathologist and histopathologist; ii) Professor Owen Arthurs, consultant paediatric radiologist; iii) Professor Sally Kinsey, consultant paediatric haematologist; iv) Professor Peter Hindmarsh, consultant paediatric endocrinologist; v) Professor Stavros Stivaros, consultant paediatric neuroradiologist; vi) Dr Simon Kenney, consultant paediatric surgeon.
Can you point out the statisticians?
The Telegraph article I linked to above states:
Partly prompted by the case, in 2022, the RSS “Statistics and The Law” section produced a paper entitled “Healthcare serial killer or coincidence?” to help legal teams present data correctly.
It recommended that investigators and prosecutors consult professional independent statisticians who could give instructions to the jury on how to interpret the data. This did not happen in the Letby trial.
(For the record: In my opinion, if only legal ballots had been counted, the Democratic candidate, Gregoire, would have lost, narrowly -- and that I saw no way to prove that at the time, nor have I since.)
Leader of the Opposition Rishi Sunak now speaks following an initial speech by PM Sir Keir Starmer
I know it won't last and this is just ceremonial, but gawd the HoC is better when they treat each other as human beings rather than something they trod in on the Millbank pavement.
Aaaaand there's Farage, who needs to get a dig in at "little man" Bercow and how he besmirched the office. Received by a few sharp intakes of breath and not a hint of "hear hear", as it was seemingly not the time or place. He's gonna have a lonely time (probably with zero f*cks given)
The dig at Bercow and the call-back to Brexit will, Farage hopes, harvest the likes and attention he is after on social media.
More than most MPs he will be speaking to an audience outside the chamber. I'm sure he's going to try and pick some arguments with other MPs, having started with someone not in Parliament.
Should Labour manage to actually deliver anything, it will rapidly render his schtick irrelevant. As far as I'm concerned, it is already.
"A senior Tory MP has suggested Nigel Farage should join the Conservative party. Sir Edward Leigh told BBC Look North his party had been "completely trashed in this election because the right wing vote is divided". Sir Edward retained his Gainsborough seat, but with a reduced majority."
It's going even worse than I expected. This country needs a professional opposition to sterilise Labour's left wing agitators and the Conservatives are abdicating themselves of that responsibility.
Frankly, it would be best for them to get the mad right winger in (and out) early. Just get it over and done with and then seek a vaguely electable candidate 3 years before the the next GE.
Remind me what happened to the last 'vaguely electable' candidate they had - I forget.
"People want immigration controls, Blair tells Starmer Ex-PM says balance needs to be struck between appreciating ‘enormous benefits’ of immigration and desire for restrictions"
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
Well if the Grauniad could find eight ‘experts’ willing to testify to a newspaper, how come the legal team of the accused was unable to find any to testify at the trial?
You should perhaps be asking that same question about every previous miscarriage of justice where the court relied on flawed medical or statistical evidence & the defence failed to challenge it effectively at the original trial.
The justice system does this over & over again.
Thankfully the British justice system learned a lot from the case of Sally Clark, and at Letby’s first trial introduced a number of statisticians as expert witnesses, to make very clear to the jury that this was not a recurrence of that miscarriage of justice.
Because there are no other statistical errors one could make except the one made in the Sally Clarke case, obviously?
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
Well if the Grauniad could find eight ‘experts’ willing to testify to a newspaper, how come the legal team of the accused was unable to find any to testify at the trial?
You should perhaps be asking that same question about every previous miscarriage of justice where the court relied on flawed medical or statistical evidence & the defence failed to challenge it effectively at the original trial.
The justice system does this over & over again.
Thankfully the British justice system learned a lot from the case of Sally Clark, and at Letby’s first trial introduced a number of statisticians as expert witnesses, to make very clear to the jury that this was not a recurrence of that miscarriage of justice.
Because there are no other statistical errors one could make except the one made in the Sally Clarke case, obviously?
Prof John Ashton, a former public health director, became exercised about Letby’s trial before it was finished. He had blown the whistle on a cluster of baby and maternal deaths at the Morecambe Bay hospitals when he was regional director of public health for the north-west of England. His direct experience, with the Morecambe Bay scandal, is that human instinct drives people to look for someone or something to blame, but the root causes are often more complicated and numerous.
It's almost been forgotten that the complete opposite happened in this case. That's not to say that proves Letby is guilty, but I think we can discount the possibility that she was scapegoated.
Sorry, but this is rubbish. Hospital upper management may have denied the possibility that Letby was responsible, but the consultants in the ward became convinced that she was responsible in preference to blaming the (unacceptably poor - we have the reports!) standard of care being meted out by their own department.
Prof Ashton is (rightly imo) pointing out that consultants have a record of leaping to blaming individuals rather than systemic issues that are ultimately their responsibility.
Air embolism is not caused by lackadaisical medical care, and seems to have been the cause of the collapse of several of these infants under Letby's care.
The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me.
Well if the Grauniad could find eight ‘experts’ willing to testify to a newspaper, how come the legal team of the accused was unable to find any to testify at the trial?
You should perhaps be asking that same question about every previous miscarriage of justice where the court relied on flawed medical or statistical evidence & the defence failed to challenge it effectively at the original trial.
The justice system does this over & over again.
Ultimately too few people in society understand maths, let alone statistics in complex cases. Take the classic Sally Clarke case. Two sudden infant deaths, which Roy Meadow (not a statistician) suggested was a 1 in 17 million chance. This is of course wrong, as it assumes that the two incidents are entirely independent, when they are not. But no-one from the defence challenged this effectively, and the jury bought the line and convicted.
I'd like to think that if I have been on the jury I might have disagreed, but it would be hard to argue in a room with 11 others who probably were not aware of the complications around the stats presented.
I have no idea if Letby is guilty, but I have seen some suggestions that the stats used against her are questionable (for instance saying she was on duty when all the babies died is ok, but they have stripped out many other baby deaths that don't fit the pattern). Selection of data is crucial when looking for trends - bias the selection and you conclusions are unsound.
Off topic, has Euro 24 done away with the runners-up match? It's not listed on the BBC website and used to take place on the day before the final, as I recall?
Hasn't been around for the Euros for several tournaments, I think.
When Wales reached semis in 2016, we did not have a playoff but finished in third place due to goal difference. They were the days...
Comments
So another @TPUSA “ambassador” appears to be a bit of a virulent antisemite.
https://x.com/joshtpm/status/1810646467377254690
They are not overburdened with friends as it is
(I see it is more international, but is it USA-centric?)
Frankly, it would be best for them to get the mad right winger in (and out) early. Just get it over and done with and then seek a vaguely electable candidate 3 years before the the next GE.
Sorry but I'm being consistent, I rounded to nearest percentage point consistently even when the rounding was going against my point.
And I think rounding to the nearest percentage point is entirely appropriate as after that it really does fall into the realm of rounding errors, considering we are dealing with such small numbers as well as looking at a 20 year span when 20 years ago cycling mileages were lower than they are today (which hasn't been taken into account) and cars had less safety features than they have today (also not taken into account).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c727ny2jd84o
Let's go with Barty's per mile analysis. Drivers spend very little time on pavements compared with cyclists, yet cause 90x as many fatalities on them.
The country needs a professional opposition to hold the centre-left Labour government to account; your obsession with 'left wing agitators' is irrelevant. Indeed far from needing to be 'sterilised', the few hard left Labour MPs are more likely to be aiding the opposition.
Reform might make progress in the north, but that is more problematic than it seems... Closeness to Russia is not just unpopular...
Sir Edward Leigh, who is almost the stereotype reactionary, is unlikely to be heard however.
A rare example of ‘celebrity drink’ done properly, rather than some random white label Californian crap sold at a large markup, which is what most of them are.
That’s 100billion vehicle miles, making cycling 1.8% of vehicular miles on the non-strategic network. So with your approach to rounding (1.1 -> 1 & 1.8 -> 2) that gives us a ceiling of half the rate of pedestrian deaths for cyclists vs motorised vehicles.
Another way to get at comparable figures would be to look at local authority traffic surveys.
NCC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Conservatism_Conference
CPAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Political_Action_Conference
Another example of the blob, it was spearheaded by statutory consultee the uber-blob quango Natural England, unaccountable entirely to democratic oversite, told planning authorities they mustn't allow developments without being able to show nutrient neutrality.
Can the Labour party really be brave enough to face down the environmental groups?
It will get wearing quickly.
EXC: National Security Adviser Sir Tim Barrow has been told he will not become the UK’s next ambassador to the US, as Downing Street gears up to make a political appointee, with David Miliband and Peter Mandelson the two front-runners
https://x.com/kitty_donaldson/status/1810681373021073707
Although the producers might be a bit more aware of Davey, and what he might do on air!
What an aspiration !!!!!!
That doesn’t work and you know it.
If it did you could add Green to Labour, and where do the LDs fit?
More than most MPs he will be speaking to an audience outside the chamber. I'm sure he's going to try and pick some arguments with other MPs, having started with someone not in Parliament.
* IIRC (I may not be), that's how we got them into both world wars.
In recent years I've added another group to that list: people glued to their cellphones. And have had a few "close encounters", even so.
The justice system does this over & over again.
Almost as many said Lab/LD/Green.
Farage himself said it was different to 2019, and he couldn't deliver Reform voters to the Tories, even if he stood down.
Even if a lot of Reform 24 turn out to be Tory 19, we need to remember that the Tories in 19 were the Get Brexit Done coalition that took the Red Wall. There might be a right wing coalition on some issues, but without something as big as Brexit, Reform voters aren't going to move as a block to an economically right wing Tory party.
But we can’t go after the farmers - that’s far too politically challenging. Much better to go after the politically less well connected house building industry.
It's not about the good of the country. It's about him.
The NFU and the CLA may try their best, but I don't think Mr Starmer and friends are in their pocket to the same extent as eg Therese Coffey.
@OwenJones84
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17m
There is at least a significant chance that Lucy Letby was a gross miscarriage of justice.
This excellent article should be read widely.
There's too many cases of wrongful convictions on the basis of statistical evidence and complex medical arguments."
https://x.com/OwenJones84/status/1810685940710432821
PB on first day of new Parliament: let's just talk about Farage (and ignore Starmer etc.).
Note that in court contest re: result of 2024 Governor's race in WA State, the lead attorney for the Democrats had both a law degree AND a mathematics degree, both from Harvard.
His math skills proved VERY useful in understanding basics about an election race / court contest which concluded with Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire beating her Republican opponent by margin of +133 votes out of more than 2.8 million cast.
Will this be paused whilst legislation is passed abolishing elections for hereditary peers?
The Telegraph has also published an article today on the Letby trial which goes into a more detailed critique of the statistical evidence: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/09/lucy-letby-serial-killer-or-miscarriage-justice-victim/
Dr Evans advised the police on the instruction of experts from specific specialisations
and further experts were instructed and provided reports as set out below:
i) Dr Andreas Marnerides, forensic pathologist and histopathologist;
ii) Professor Owen Arthurs, consultant paediatric radiologist;
iii) Professor Sally Kinsey, consultant paediatric haematologist;
iv) Professor Peter Hindmarsh, consultant paediatric endocrinologist;
v) Professor Stavros Stivaros, consultant paediatric neuroradiologist;
vi) Dr Simon Kenney, consultant paediatric surgeon.
Can you point out the statisticians?
I don't really see why it should be paused. The current law is the current law until it isn't.
(For the record: In my opinion, if only legal ballots had been counted, the Democratic candidate, Gregoire, would have lost, narrowly -- and that I saw no way to prove that at the time, nor have I since.)
Ex-PM says balance needs to be struck between appreciating ‘enormous benefits’ of immigration and desire for restrictions"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/09/people-want-immigration-controls-blair-tells-starmer/
I'd like to think that if I have been on the jury I might have disagreed, but it would be hard to argue in a room with 11 others who probably were not aware of the complications around the stats presented.
I have no idea if Letby is guilty, but I have seen some suggestions that the stats used against her are questionable (for instance saying she was on duty when all the babies died is ok, but they have stripped out many other baby deaths that don't fit the pattern). Selection of data is crucial when looking for trends - bias the selection and you conclusions are unsound.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-2024-election/prediction-model/president
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