The Dickens Connection
Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. On days such as these, it has become something of a tradition to write a blog post linking the subject of the anniversary in question with the theme of the blog—no matter how tenuous the link. Charles Dickens and HMS Beagle? That’s quite a tall order. All right, I’m game…

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Will a new HMS Beagle set sail in 2013?
The HMS Beagle Project is seeking a port in the UK where a modern replica of the ship that carried Darwin on his famous voyage will be built.

Let’s bloody hope so!

Hopefully we can find a way to make the outside of the ship really, really look like the Beagle, because that’s the inspiring thing: people want to see the Beagle sailing into Galápagos with scientists aboard.

Dammit, Karen, you finally made me cry.

Kids love dinosaurs. Kids love science. I wonder what we do to so many of them to drive away their natural sense of wonder and curiosity.

Good grief, we need something to inspire them.

 
Feel free to embed it in your own blog posts.

Out of this world!

Literally.

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

Listen now:

Download | Embeddable Player

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.

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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Has this meme got legs?

(Pass it on.)

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

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?