The Red Notebook

I’ve produced another of my hilarious Beagle Project promo videos. Careful you don’t split your sides:

 
Feel free to embed it in your own blog posts.

H O L Y   C R A P ! ! The Beagle Project has a blog post written on board the International Space Station by astronaut Mike Barratt.

Out of this world!

Literally.

This afternoon, the Beagle Project’s Director of Science, Dr Karen James, and I recorded a podcast, which I have named ‘Messages from Above’, for reasons which will become apparent if you listen to it. It contains lots of Darwinny goodness, and some pretty cool space stuff.

I’ve never been in a podcast before. They might just catch on.

Listen now:

Download | Embeddable Player

The Beagle Project chaps receive email from the International Space Station.

…recorded in deepest Wales, in online now. And top-notch stuff it is too.

Peter McGrath interviews fellow projecteer Dr Karen James about why we need an HMS Beagle, what it’s got to do with Nasa, what the Doc does for her day job, how Darwin’s statue moved, and a bunch of other stuff. All accompanied by courting house sparrows. Go and download immediately.

Well done, chaps. The Emmy is in the post.

Today is my 44th birthday.

Charles Darwin spent his 44th birthday working on barnacles, his great theory of evolution by means of Natural Selection already documented and filed away, to be published in the event of his untimely death. I shall be spending the afternoon of my 44th birthday in the pub, drinking nice, non-chilled, British beer with friends and family. Barnacles or beer: it’s a fine line between scientific genius and having a life.

Those many thousands of you who are racked with guilt for having forgotten yet again to send me a birthday card, will no doubt want to make amends by making a small donation to the Beagle Project. Tell them it’s in lieu of Richard’s birthday card. They’ll know what you mean.

Those awfully nice chaps over at the Beagle Project have assimilated me into their Beagle blogging collective. My current designation is Four of Four. Look out ScienceBlogs, Discovery Network and Nature Network, we’re about to eat your lunch.

I have no intention of closing the Red Notebook—even though, let’s be honest, I don’t post to it nearly as often as I should—but, from now on, my more Beaglesque posts will be over at the Beagle Project blog. My first three posts over there were:

• Conrad Martens’ sketchbooks
• Download it while you still can
• Beagle barks and poops

Some soft porn yesterday.

The UK’s National Heritage Memorial Fund has announced that it will be donating £10 million of our National Lottery losings to the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery. (I don’t think I’ve ever used the word National four times in one sentence before.)

The donation is to help the galleries keep Titian’s masterpiece Diana and Actaeon on public display in the UK. Jenny Abramsky, chair of the NHMF, reportedly said that it is as “important as ever” to protect the UK’s cultural heritage.

Erm… The last time I looked, Titian was a Johnny Foreigner from Venice, in modern-day Italy. How the loss of such a painting—magnificent as we are assured it is—would be a loss to the UK’s cultural heritage is quite beyond me.

It seems to me that there must be better ways of spending TEN MILLION pounds’ worth of quids. Like, say, oh, I dunno, building TWO HMS Beagles. One should really be enough, I suppose, but, hey, if they’ve got £10 million to give away, why not build two? To doubly celebrate our great scientific heritage. Instead of frittering it away on some old soft porn.

It’s just a thought.

But all this talk of Titian gives me the perfect excuse to repeat one of my favourite limericks (not, alas, written by yours truly):

While Titian was mixing rose madder,
A model posed nude on a ladder.
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition,
So he snuck up the ladder and had her.

(And there you were beginning to think I was some sort of philistine.)

Now that I’ve returned home and a couple of days have passed, I think it only right and proper that I give a well-considered summary of the Natural History Museum’s Darwin exhibition. Here it is:

V E R Y   G O O D   I N D E E D !

If you get the chance to see it, you really should. The two highlights of the exhibition for me were getting to see Darwin’s original Red Notebook in the flesh, so to speak, and being shown the original Galápagos mockingbird specimens which first set Darwin to wondering about evolution by the Beagle Project’s Karen James, who has recently been working with these very specimens.

The potentially embarrassing moment of the evening came when I seized the opportunity (over mulled wine) to ask a snail expert working for the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature a question which has been bothering me for over six years now: why are there are so few snails in my garden? It hadn’t occurred to me that there are an awful lot of snails in the world, and that this particular expert might specialise in those from another part of it (like the African rift lakes, for example).

Still, I think I got away with it.

Many thanks to Karen and Peter from the Beagle Project for our fantastic day out in London yesterday. I had never met either of them before, but we were already old friends. More about the Darwin exhibition later, but, in the meantime, here are some photos (originals here):

As announced yesterday, all day today, I’ll be live-blogging my trip to London to meet those awfully nice chaps from the Beagle Project. In the evening 3pm (UK time), we’ll be attending the opening bash at the new Darwin bicentennial exhibition.

Keep your eyes on the frame to the left (or click the link below it to open a separate mini-window). There is no need to refresh your screen: it will happen automagically.

While you’re at it, why not make a donation to the Beagle Project?

You know you want to.

Postscript: The live-blogging session is now over. A full transcript of it can be read here.

Tomorrow (Friday), I’m off to see some old friends whom I’ve never met before: Peter McGrath and Karen ‘I used to be called Nunatak’ James from the Beagle Project. Peter and Karen need no introduction.

Karen works at the Natural History Museum in London and has managed to get us tickets to the opening bash at the new Darwin bicentennial exhibition. For a total Darwin groupie like me, this is about as cool as things can possibly get, so I’ve decided to try an experiment in so-called live-blogging.

I warn you now that the technology is untried and untested, and will rely on my sending updates via my mobile phone and/or minuscule Nokia N810 handheld computer. There’s plenty that could go wrong as this is fairly cutting-edge ‘Web 2.0′ stuff, but, what the hell, let’s given it a go! With any luck, Peter and/or Karen might also provide occasional updates.

If all goes to plan, the updates should start tomorrow morning (UK time) and continue into the late evening, possibly resuming Saturday morning. I have more than a sneaking suspicion that beer will also be involved at some point in the proceedings.

So tune into the Red Notebook throughout the day tomorrow to see if any of this nonsense actually works. If you set yourself up with a FriendFeed account, you’ll even be able to add your own comments to anything we publish.

The BBC Wales news website has been covering the Beagle Project’s recently announced partnership with Nasa. The piece includes an embedded BBC Wales radio news article, which includes an interview with a friendly astronaut.

… is my latest catch-phrase. Feel free to use it yourself—particularly when conversations are beginning to lull/bore, are going off track, or are simply not about the Beagle Project. If used in blog post comments, make sure you provide a link back to the Beagle Project website, so that people will know what you’re talking about. But don’t do it too often, or the joke could start to wear a bit thin, and you might be mistaken for a spammer. It’s quality that counts, not quantity. (Oh, and best not say it when people are actually talking about the Beagle Project, or they’ll think you’re a total wazzock.)

Has this meme got legs?

(Pass it on.)

Postscript: Actually, come to think of it, it would make a damn fine T-shirt.

The Beagle Project has been on a bit of a roll over the last nine days: first they finally achieve UK charitable status, then they’re hob-nobbing it with tea and HobNobs™ at the House of Lords, and now they’ve entered into a ‘trans-atmospheric’ Space Act Agreement with Nasa. Yes, that Nasa; the ones who landed on the fucking moon. And get this: it was Nasa who approached them!

The International Space Station yesterday

Photo: Nasa

According to their press release, scientists, teachers and students sailing aboard the rebuilt HMS Beagle will collaborate with astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to investigate the biology of plankton blooms, coral reefs and other ocean surface and terrestrial ecosystems. Using satellite link-ups, students in classrooms and laboratories will be able to follow the voyage, and interact with scientists as they apply the tools and techniques of modern science in Darwin’s footsteps ashore and at sea. From space, astronauts will use the ISS’s high resolution imaging to photograph the Beagle and fix her position as she sails into plankton blooms and takes seawater samples for chemical and biological analysis. Samples will be analysed aboard by marine biologists and also processed and shipped to labs for DNA sequencing and comparison to libraries of known marine organisms using DNA barcoding and metagenomics.

If that alone doesn’t justify the cost of the ISS, I don’t know what does.

I can’t wait for the day when the magnificent square-rigger pulls up at a Santiago Island dock, and they get on the blower to their friends in the ISS and utter the immortal words, Galápagos Base: the Beagle has landed.

How could they not do?

One day back in 1831, a young English gentleman took up his pen and wrote his name and new address in the front of his German New Testament. Call me biased, but it must surely rank as the most awesome book inscription ever:

Inscription in Charles Darwin’s German New Testament
© The Charles Darwin Trust and reproduced with their kind permission

The young Charles Darwin had no way of knowing that he was about to embark on a journey which would lead to a paradigm-shifting scientific revolution, and hammer the final nail in the coffin of the conflicting creation myths described in the first couple of chapters of Genesis.

But why on Earth would a young, English naturalist want to take a German New Testament with him on a voyage of discovery? Apparently, it was to help him brush up on his German during the long months at sea. His intentions were good, but I suspect he didn’t do much brushing up: many years after the voyage, Charles Darwin was still having to have German texts translated for him.

Darwin’s German New Testament still exists, and is in the possession of the Charles Darwin Trust, which has kindly given those awfully nice chaps at the Beagle Project permission to make use of the above image—and they have very generously let me have this nice little scoop. Thanks, chaps!

Now, go over there and give them a whole pile of your money so that one day soon, some other young scientist will be able to inscribe one of their books with the address H.M.S. Beagle.

One-hundred and fifty- seventy-seven years ago today, on 24th August, 1831, the 22-year-old Charles Darwin received news that Captain Fitzroy was looking for a naturalist and companion for his forthcoming voyage to survey the southern extremity of America.

For more on this subject, see my post from two years ago entitled Henslow’s letter.

Darwin later described the Voyage of the Beagle as ‘by far the most important event in my life’. It’s wonderful to think that, some day in the not-too-distant future, young scientists will once again set sail on a new Beagle.

Postscript: Oops!

See also: The Darwinian Revolution