In recent months, I have begun to look covetously at friends’ natural history blogs, where they simply write about what they have seen in the natural world. So I have decided to set up my own natural history blog and reserve the Red Notebook primarily for Darwin, evolution, history, science, etc.

But, as I hope you will gather from the new blog’s name (and cool domain name), Darwin will not be entirely forgotten over at the new blog: Life’s Grandeur.

More information and instructions »

During the migration exercise from the old domain, I had to convert an awful lot of program code and data. Much of this I managed to automate, but I still ended up having to make a lot of changes by hand. Entire chunks of code were removed, others were inserted. I tried to rationalise and simplify wherever possible.

The result is, quite frankly, a bit of a mess. Yes, the new site seems to work reasonably OK, but the programs behind it contain literally dozens of snippets of code which I’m pretty sure are redundant. There are conditional statements whose conditions can never be met, declared variables which are never used, functions which are never called, and entire scripts which are never run. Or at least I think there are. It’s sometimes difficult to tell whether it’s safe to remove a piece of code, so I tended to err on the side of caution and leave the stuff in: code which is never run can’t do much harm—inefficient and messy though it is.

To be honest, I take a perverse pleasure in the Friends of Charles Darwin’s website containing so much junk code. It seems rather appropriate.

Not much sign of intelligent design around here!

• Friends of Charles Darwin homepage: http://friendsofdarwin.com/
• The Red Notebook blog: http://blog.friendsofdarwin.com/
• The Red Notebook RSS Feed: http://blog.friendsofdarwin.com/feed/

A domain of our own! W00t! What better way to celebrate PZ Myers’ 52nd birthday?

This morning, I woke rather early and immediately realised that I had been a month premature: the Darwin-Wallace paper was published on 1st July, 1859. What an idiot! So I have equally quickly taken down the post. Sorry about that. Glad I spotted my gaff before anyone else did.

Tune in again at the same time next month…

What does irk me slightly about the site’s Google ranking is that, if I were a neutral observer (which obviously I’m not), I like to think that I would still want a site which is totally dedicated to Charles Darwin, which contains the word ‘darwin’ in its URL, which has (as I type) 1852 members who have declared Charlie is my Darwin and filled in an actual enrolment form, and which has been on the web since 1995 to come considerably higher in a search for the name “Charles Darwin” than a measley 44th place. Especially as some of the so-called websites with higher rankings only contain single pages mentioning the great man.

But I suppose I’m biased.

Yes, I know Google ranking is based on how many other sites have linked to the site in question and not necessarily on actual content, but shouldn’t there be a place on the web for search engines with an element of (if you’ll forgive the expression) intelligent design?

Which is why I was so pleased to learn about Mahalo, which claims to be the world’s first human-powered search engine. That’s right: real, live, intelligent human beings compile the search results for Mahalo. And (get this), if you search Mahalo for the phrase “Charles Darwin”, there, in a section labelled ‘Charles Darwin Fan Sites’, on a page compiled by a real, live, intelligent human being named Sara, you will find a link to the one and only Friends of Charles Darwin website.

Thank you Sara.

For the geeks amongst you, the new facility is powered by del.icio.us and makes use of a special tag entitled focdlink. There’s even an RSS feed, if you’re that way inclined.

Meanwhile, in terms of website news, I have finally got round to adding some content to the Books section.

Thanks, whoever you are.

Since the re-launch of the Friends of Charles Darwin website 2½ days ago, the number of new members joining has been truly phenomenal. It had taken 12 years to amass (if that’s an appropriate word) the 415 members prior to Wednesday evening’s relaunch. At the time of writing (07:15 on Saturday) there are now 727 members. That’s a 75% increase in 2½ days. Like I said, phenomenal.

The reason for the incredible response is quite clear: two mentions on PZ Myers’ hugely popular evolutionary weblog, Pharyngula. It was Peter McGrath from the the Beagle Project, Pembrokeshire who tipped him off a few hours before the planned re-launch, and, within minutes of PZ’s initial post, new members began to pour in thick and fast (no offence intended). Then, when PZ published a follow-up post (later picked up by Seed Magazine) the next day, all hell broke loose. I’m not kidding, I thought I was under some sort of denial-of-service attack: new membership applications were coming in so quickly, the system was struggling to cope. People were starting to get record-locking errors as two or more of them tried to join at exactly the same time (I had realised that this was a risk, but had decided it was so unlikely that it wasn’t worth doing anything about it). Then I became part of the problem by trying to update the membership list while the new applications were still piling in. So I gave up and waited for things to calm down (i.e. for America to go to bed).

Two and a half days later, and I’m still feeling shell-shocked.

Anyway, welcome to the Friends of Charles Darwin, you lot! (And I use the word advisedly.)

(Absolutely no pressure or anything… Thanks for nothing, Peter.)

Man, this Laphroaig is good!

Well, all weblogs need a name, and I wanted this one’s to have a distinctly Darwinian ring to it:

The Red Notebook (as Darwin scholars refer to it) was the first in a series of notebooks that Darwin used to record and develop his thoughts on evolution. He began the notebook towards the end of his voyage aboard HMS Beagle. Initially, he used it simply for recording the ship’s location and depth soundings, but, on returning to England, he filled its later pages with his early evolutionary musings. His subsequent notebooks contained much more information, but these are referred to as Notebook B, C, D etc.—which don’t have quite the same ring to them.

So the Red Notebook it is!

In 2002, at home with a broken leg, I was invited to contribute an essay to a book being compiled in celebration of Darwin Day 2003. The essay (which I have published online for the first time today) encouraged people to become amateur scientists, exhorting readers (with new emphasis added) to:

Build yourself a slug-arium; count the spots on ladybirds; look for peppered moths on tree trunks; try to create a blue sweet pea; breed pigeons; find out whether male crustaceans ever fight for the females; look for seeds in bird pellets; try floating seeds in salt-water; keep a notebook; involve your friends; email people; read books; search the web; if you have a website, publish your findings (even if they’re inconclusive).

… I thought it was about time I took my own advice.

I intend to use this latter-day Red Notebook to record my own thoughts and discoveries about Darwin, evolution, natural history, and related matters. I do not claim to be an expert in any of these fields, so I am sure I will make a few mistakes on the way. In fact, I hope I make a few mistakes on the way, for mistakes are an important part of (as another of my scientific heroes, Richard Feynman, put it) the pleasure of finding things out.

It should be fun.