Welcome to the Darwin Correspondence Project’s new web site. The main feature of the site is an online database with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865. This includes all the surviving letters from the Beagle voyage – online for the first time – and all the letters from the years around the publication of Origin of species in 1859.
May 30, 2007
May 28, 2007
May 4, 2007
[OBIT] Wally Schirra — Mercury, Gemini, Apollo astronaut
When Wally Schirra Said, “Go to Hell”
Well written, well done, Jeffrey Kluger of Time Magazine.
May 3, 2007
[URL] John Woram’s Galápagos History & Cartography
The Encantadas: Galápagos History & Cartography
Wide-ranging collection of materials on the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador, collected by the author of CHARLES DARWIN SLEPT HERE.
Ephemera, maps, texts, factoids. Darwin’s Journal. Darwin’s Diary. H.M.S. Beagle logs. Eleanor Roosevelt “My Day” (her description of her trip to the Galápagos in 1944).
More.
May 1, 2007
Renzo Piano Building Workshop – Official Site
The official site for Renzo Piano’s Renzo Piano Building Workshop.
Nice use of Flash.
RPBW are the architects for the new California Academy of Sciences which is going up in Golden Gate Park, across the Concourse from the DeYoung Museum. The new Academy will open late 2008. 370K sq ft — of which 95K sq ft are public space. Living roof. Zounds.
We almost stopped into the Academy’s temporary digs on Howard Street yesterday, but I was tuckered out, having walked down to SFMOMA to meet up with his nibs and visit, among other exhibits, the Picasso and American Art exhibit. Get there if thee can. Exhibit closes Monday, May 28, 2007.
Philistine that I are, I did not get Brice Marden, especially his monochrome work.
Where were we? Ah, yes: Renzo Piano Building Workshop. The RPBW site covers projects, bio, history, &c. An interactive map gives access to projects worldwide.
Interesting.
(Walked back home again, too, even though it was a free transit day: RT was 4mi+ and then there was all the walking around inside SFMOMA)
April 29, 2007
Are you ocean people?
It is the mission of The Ocean Channel to provide ‘ocean people’ from around the world with a comprehensive and centralized source of ocean news, education, conservation, and entertainment.
[...]
Focus is the aggregation, production and distribution of premium ocean content for an array of media–specifically, broadband Internet, television, and DVD home video
Deep resource. Conservation issues. Film.
It is only through knowledge and education that we can expect our audience to recognize the challenges the sea faces now and in the future.
Wander through this one.
February 22, 2007
News! Cocoa may improve brain blood flow
One of the sessions I missed at AAAS was a session Sunday titled, “The Neurobiology of Chocolate: A Mind-Altering Experience?”
Harold Schmitz of Mars, Inc. co-organized the symposium. Mars, Inc. happens to be sponsoring research into why chocolate is good for you and how they can make it even better. (Heard of CocoaVia?) I’d spent time in a session a few years back covering similar and/or earlier research on the subject. This session covered recent research including a presentation by Ian MacDonald (University of Nottingham Medical School) on “The Effect of Flavanol-Rich Cocoa on the fMRI Response to a Cognitive Task in Healthy Young People.”
Yee haw.
Luckily, there were science writers in the audience to suck it all up for me. CNN reports: Cocoa may improve brain blood flow
Sunday, I was elsewhere — in an all-day seminar on Virtual Worlds which included papers like “Comparing Mental Health Applications Using Individually Administered Virtual Reality and Second Life: Conceptual and Ethical Issues” from Skip Rizzo, USC, and “Virtual Publics: Youths’ Lives in Emergent Social Worlds” from Danah Boyd at UCB.
John Lester (AKA Pathfinder Linden) at Linden Labs organized the seminar. Linden Labs, just down the hill from me, is the creator (are the creators?) of Second Life, which I messed around with playing with after a panel at the Commonwealth Club that we attended last December.
I finally signed up yesterday but with my computer’s hiccupy-response to requests to turn and move and change the color of my coat, my experience wasn’t optimal. Problems with scaling? Problems with my computer? I’ll try again later today and see if I get further.
Sorry I was to miss out on the latest scoop about cocoa, but the Virtual Worlds seminars were crack.
[Thanks for the cocoa link, Sam]
January 13, 2007
APOD: 2007 January 13 – Comet Over Krakow
APOD: 2007 January 13 – Comet Over Krakow
Almost caught it this morning, but the sun had already tipped up above the eastern foothills by the time I got out of bed. Headed off to Liguria Bakery for rosemary focaccia and rosemary/garlic focaccia in lieu. Ym.
Frederic Larson caught an interesting glimpse of the McNaught a couple days ago.
Update: Keera snapped it too!
Update 2: More on McNaught from msnbc.