I picked up on this new blog at ScienceBlogs - "Blogging the Origin" via Science's Origins blog.  In this blog, science writer and evolutionist John Whitfield, who bravely admits to never having read The Origin of Species before, is conducting a book club cum blog as he reads the text, chapter by chapter in this anniversary year.  As I write, he's covered the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2, with the next instalment due on Friday.  He plans to finish in time to celebrate Darwin's 200th birthday.

I haven't read The Origins since I was a teenager (which is an upsettingly long time ago), and this has inspired me to read it again.  But which version?   The old Pelican paperback edition I read all those years ago is a later edition of the tome, while the edition reprinted in the compilation From So Simple a Beginning", edited by E. O. Wilson, is I think the first edition (but lacks a certain portability - the volume also has Voyage of the Beagle, Descent of Man and The Expression of Emotions, all in a hardback binding).  Perhaps I should limit myself to the 1858 pair of papers by Darwin and Wallace?

Here is a visitor map - it should show where visitors are located!

Well, Andrew Brown (in who's blog at the Guardian I first read Clifford Longley's dopey ASA complaint) has written a little bit more about the affair, and judges that "Clifford Longley has been silly".  At least it would seem that the text that Longley appears to have sent to newspaper columnists up and down the country was sent by him.

His defence is that the quotes are genuine even if he did not collect them and he that he never claimed to have collected them himself. It didn't seem to him the important thing about them. Some of them he had in his own library, or could remember reading; others were new to him, but all seemed germane to his general point, that there are distinguished scientists who take the strong anthropic principle seriously as evidence for design in the universe. This was the point he wanted to make to the ASA, which offers a web form for complaints on its web site into which he cut and pasted what he had found. 

The Register reports that the UK ISP Demon has removed access to a larcge chunk of internet history.  The error pages that users are presented with apparently imply this is in response to the site being listed on the IWF blacklist.  Amusingly, El Reg reports:

One Demon customer tells us he was unable to visit archived versions of websites run by the BBC, Parliament, the United Nations, the Internet Watch Foundation, Demon Internet, and Thus. In other words, this customer points out, Thus is blocking its own web history. "It is nuts," he says.

This does seem to be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.  I presume there are dubious sites archived at the wayback machine, but to block the lot seems a bit extreme.  Presumably the internet block derives from the way Demon have sought to implement the IWF blacklist.

Apparently the 1911 England and Wales census is now online, and I feel a renewed enthusiasm for a spot of internet genalogy (registered users in the apprpriate group have access to my genealogy web pages on this site)!  When the 1901 census data went online a few years ago, demand for access hugely exceeded the capacity of the servers.  It would be nice if the system this time round could cope, and in fact this seems to be the case!  Woohoo!

Link to the 1911 census website;  BBC News report on the 1911 census;

Many tropical diseases are transmitted by insect vectors - malaria (which is caused by Plasmodium parasites) and yellow fever (caused by a virus) being examples of diseases transmitted by Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes respectively.  Dengue fever is another viral disease that is transmitted by Aedes aegypti.  One crucial feature of the disease transmission cycle is that once the disease organism is collected by the mosquito in a blood meal, it takes some time to develop within the insect before it becomes infectious.  In the case of both malaria and dengue fever, this period of time is about two weeks.  This paper evaluates the use of the endosymbiotic bactera Wolbachia to shorten mosquito lifespan in the hope that this will reduce disease transmission.

In a sense, this is an attractive strategy, and one that makes use of one of the properties of some Wolbachia strains to shorten host lifespan. I have previously blogged about some aspects of Wolbachia biology in the immune system of insects.  Wolbachia infection is maternally transmitted, and spreads through insect populations because of a reproductive drive known as cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) - infected females mated to uninfected males yield infected offspring, while uninfected females mated to infected males yield no offspring.  This reproductive drive is presumably sufficient to drive even strains of Wolbachia which have negative effects on viability (such as reduced lifespan) through the population.

Ars Technica reports that SCO, the bankrupt (both morally and financially) company with a tangled history of amalgamations and renaming, and which has been fighting a losing battle against Linux (via courtroom debacles with Novell, IBM, Autozone and Red Hat) has filed a fourth reorganisation plan.  The whole sorry saga of how SCO's deluded CEO Darl McBride dragged the company into a legal morass can be read at the famous and excellent Groklaw blog.  With SCO's claims mere dust in the wind, Groklaw appears to be entering a phase of consolidation, as it sorts through the astonishing quantity of court filings and other documentation and comment the site has generated over the last four years or so since SCO launched is big action against IBM.  During that period, the story has been spectacularly convoluted, ultimately revealing that not only does SCO not own Unix copyrights, but that they actually owed Novell a significant wad of cash (still unpaid as SCO use it to bankroll continued legal action).

As far as I know, and despite his role in the company's looming demise, McBride seems to remain at the helm and is presumably one of the four top executives in line for continued remuneration.

The journal Science has launched a new blog to celebrate the Darwin 200 anniversary, entitled Origins. There's an rss feed.

In the current issue of the journal are articles by Peter Bowler on Darwin's Originality and by Carl Zimmer entitled On the Origin of Life on Earth. [subscription may be required].

It's a few days now since Clifford Longley's supposed complaint to the ASA was released on the internet via the wonders of blogging (for example search Google for the string "According to growing numbers of scientists, the laws and constants of nature are so").

I did just that search, along with a few others to see whether Clifford Longley had indeed made that complaint to the ASA with the plagiarised text.  (See my post Rebutting Clifford Longley), and I'm unable to see any  evidence that (a) the complaint has been made and (b) that it is anything to do with Clifford Longley.

The ASA complaint about the Atheist Bus ad campaign, as reported in the Guardian website supposedly emanates from one Clifford Longley.  In fact, the complaint is largely plagiarised from a religious website, and makes the same strategic cock-ups as many a creationist tract does: old quotations, out of context quotations, quotations incorrectly attributed, quotations that may never have been made.  Add to the mix an argument from authority, presumably right up the street for someone who can accept the most improbable drivel from an priest figure, and you have a classic set of misapprehension masquerading as an academic exercise.  Perhaps the whole thing is a hoax?

I read in the blogosphere that over 50 complaints have been made to the ASA - if they are all as pathetic as this one and that of Stephen Green, I say bring them on!