Good news, and bad news… 17 Apr 2008 First, the good news. The inestimable John van Whye has added, with the help of his team of course, 90,000 scanned images of Darwin’s journals, manuscripts and letters. Now the bad news. The Utrecht Herbarium is closing, and no plans have been made to store and make available its collection of type specimens. Why this matters is that the very name of species depend on there being type specimens. Go read Catalogue of Organisms, an amazing blog in any case, on the matter. Ecology and Biodiversity Evolution Humor Species and systematics
Ecology and Biodiversity Liveblogging the conference: Stephen Peck 14 Mar 2008 Lunch being had we crowd into a new room to hear Stephen Peck, a biologist from Brigham Young University down the road a ways in Provo. Stephen is talking about ecological boundaries. Read More
Humor The real Olympic performers 24 Aug 200818 Sep 2017 Certain nations who shall remain nameless have been doing a fair bit of skiting about how well they’ve done. So I thought I’d do a bit of number crunching. Of course it isn’t completed (or is it?) but using the Wikipedia population figures and the official medal tally, I plotted… Read More
Epistemology 50 words for snow 6: constructing phenomena 11 Dec 20171 Mar 2019 Series Conceptual confusion The economics of cultural categories What are phenomena? What counts as sociocultural? Species Constructing phenomena Explanations and phenomena There is a naive empiricist view held by nobody on close inspection, that phenomena merely present themselves to the observer, and call for explanation. At least since Kant, such… Read More
Ah HA! I know where that squiggly scrawl in your masthead comes from. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=image&itemID=CUL-DAR121.-&pageseq=38 Very clever.
Ah HA! I know where that squiggly scrawl in your masthead comes from. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=image&itemID=CUL-DAR121.-&pageseq=38 Very clever.
It’s always shocking to observe of closing of any kind archives (google groups t.o, or real specimens..). former t.o’ist MrKAT from Finland
I don’t know what’s behind the economic problems of the herbarium, but I’d be curious to know if it has something to do with the recent drive for privatizing and “effectivizing”. In other European countries, this has resulted in absurd situations when university buildings are given for free to new state-owned companies to manage, and they then charge market-based rent for the offices and labs, although in most cases the university has no real choice of location.