What Alfred Russel Wallace Really Thought About Darwin 79
Calopteryx writes "The correspondence of Alfred Russel Wallace has gone online for the first time. New Scientist has opened a wormhole between the 21st and 19th centuries and has 'interviewed' the great man."
Is a blog format possible (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is a blog format possible (Score:5, Funny)
No. No digital representation of a date can represent values before 1900, nor is it even mathematically possible.
Re:Is a blog format possible (Score:4, Funny)
Whatever buddy, it doesn't really matter.
It's all in the past now.
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No. No digital representation of a date can represent values before 1900, nor is it even mathematically possible.
Really? Are you sure about that? Not mathmatically possible? I guess negative numbers don't exist in your realm.
<david_attenborough_voice>A spectacular example of a Whoosh in the wild! Let's be careful not to disturb it</david_attenborough_voice>
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They also bastardized the series Home amazing series and I pirated the David Attenborough version off http://kat.ph/ [kat.ph] cause the only version they played in the states was narrated by the idiotic Oprah Winfrey and sounded like shit.
They should have left it alone, but for some reason most all David's older work and many newer works are redubbed in the U.S. which is just a travesty.
And another reason I pirate to get the original unedited content
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Fuck it. I was going to post a witty remark, but nothing worked, so I think I'll just go with "it's [b]Attenborough[/b] fuckwit" (that's to the GP post).
Sorry about "fuckwit".
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I should know bb tags don't work here...
sorry.
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With a number like that, you can't even manage a <b> tag? You've got premature Alzheimer's sonny, time for your meds!
Re:Is a blog format possible (Score:4, Insightful)
No. No digital representation of a date can represent values before 1900, nor is it even mathematically possible.
Really? Are you sure about that? Not mathmatically possible? I guess negative numbers don't exist in your realm.
<david_attenborough_voice>A spectacular example of a Whoosh in the wild! Let's be careful not to disturb it</david_attenborough_voice>
The original comment was tongue-in-cheek. But most computer date representation systems are prospective from modern zero date.
For example, Unix time was originally coded as elapsed whole seconds since midnight January 01, 1970 and represented time as an UNSIGNED 32-bit integer. Such systems still exist and will roll over on 2038. More modern timekeeping systems use 64-bit integers to represent time and date. I'm not sure whether they interpret them as unsigned or signed. If they interpret them as signed, there is certainly an opportunity to represent dates before 1970 and I can think of no reason not to do so since a 63-bit second count will not have a rollover problem in the next 292 billion years. I'm personally comfortable with putting the problem off that long if it also gets me a nice representation of the day on which I was born, which is before the Unix epoch.
NTP uses the same epoch date as Unix but uses the top 32 bits as seconds and the lower 32 bits as fractional seconds. It thus cannot uniquely represent dates before 1970 or after 2038.
Windows uses some different time representation systems but they suffer from similar deficiencies.
And with all that, supposing you do use a system that can represent negative numbers, you don't have to go that far back before you run into other problems. The first is what to do about leap-seconds. I'd say that once you go back before the adoption of atomic time standards, you should count days as being 86400 seconds long by definition of the ante-atomic second. That gets you back to the next problem date, which is adoption time zones synchronized to Greenwich Time or local adoption of the Gregorian Calendar. Depending on where you are, either may have happened before the other. Greenwich synchronization adds an error of up to several hours depending on location. Gregorian calendar adoption caused a slip of several days to the calendar; the later the adoption, the more days of slip. And that gets you back, at best, to 1582 A.D. Computer representation of the date is thus a very messy business back to 1582, subject to the vagaries and religion of the country under consideration. (Protestant and Orthodox countries tended to hold out against the tide of popery and non-Christian countries weren't interested in any kind of Roman dates.)
And that gets us on the Julian Calendar, which is usable back to it its introduction in 45 BC. But it was only used in the Roman Empire and its historical descendants including Christendom. That's as far as the West goes. You can then switch locally to the Jewish calendar, which represents dates back to 3670 or so BCE. But it has lot of slop in it. It's a lunisolar calendar so precise date synchronization with any modern system depends on precise knowledge of historic (and prehistoric) lunar phase with respect to the Earth's prehistoric rate of rotation. Also, the cycles were determined by observation in ancient times and we don't know whether they were always observed on the right day with respect to the lunar phase because some months would have started on a cloudy day, preventing official observation. And though that calendar can represent dates back 5773 years from today, it may not have been in use that long.
In the East, e.g. China, they had their own calendar system and the first opportunity to align it to a Western system was fairly recent. The Chinese system is lunisolar, similar to the Hebrew system, so it has the same kind of imprecision. What's worse, people recorded regnal years of the Emperors (or worse, some local potentate) and you have to know when each monarch took the throne to figure when things happened. And that only gets you back to 862 or so. Before that, people generally didn't write down what year things happened at all.
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The original comment was tongue-in-cheek. But most computer date representation systems are prospective from modern zero date.
For example, Unix time was originally coded as elapsed whole seconds since midnight January 01, 1970 and represented time as an UNSIGNED 32-bit integer. Such systems still exist and will roll over on 2038.
Actually, unsigned 32-bit integers won't overflow until about 2106 or so [google.com]. It's the signed ones [google.com] that overflow in 2038.
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Correct. (Score:3)
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I'm betting you would find it steamy when you went outside. People went outside all the time back then, unlike now.
What has the internet done to us?!
Re:Correct. (Score:4, Funny)
We gained color as compensation for the missing days, under the Law of Conservation of Colors/Days:
[reoiv.com]http://www.reoiv.com/images/random/dadbandwandcolour.jpg [reoiv.com]
Little known fact that Wallace lived in a black and white world
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It would be really interesting to see, say, the diary of Anne Frank posted in a blog format -- verbatim, possibly with historical photos added.
Or the scientific journals of Darwin.
Also semi-off-topic: I once wandered into an IRC channel and found the entire cast of Hamlet (as bots) going line by line through the script complete with /me-style actions.
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Nah, those dates in the past are the *titles* of the articles not the date they would supposedly have been posted in the blog.
old dates in URLs (Score:2)
The post URLs have old dates, such as http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1660/01/26/ [pepysdiary.com] - it doesn't say "really posted on 2003/01/26", not that I can see anywhere.
enough of the neo-Nazi conspiracy theories (Score:2)
Slashdot could use a -1 Go Back To Stormfront mod
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64 bit date formats in OpenVMS go back to 1858 IIRC.
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From this openvms faq [hoffmanlabs.com]:
The modified Julian date adopted by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) for satellite tracking is Julian Day 2400000.5, which turns out to be midnight on November 17, 1858.
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Now, WordPress automatically sets the post date and AFAIK you'd have to resort to database manipulation to change it but if there isn't already a plugin that handles this it would be easy to write one.
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The usual way to handle it is to remove dates completely from the stylesheet [pepysdiary.com] and just put the date in the title.
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Coming in late, but you might like http://www.pepysdiary.com/ [pepysdiary.com]
A wormhole into a can of worms? (Score:3)
A wormhole into a can of worms? I doubt it. Wallace has never critized Darwin publicly as far as I know, and I doubt in secrecy either. Did Victorian English ever use blunt language in writing? I don't really know but I suspect they didn't. I some of the summaries to the scanned pages and find it hard to believe there was ever
Yes, Wallace is our too little sung hero. He is not unsung (e.g. http://wallacefund.info/song-about-alfred-russel-wallace [wallacefund.info], http://wallacefund.info/mr-darwin-mr-wallace-mr-matthew-song-mr-haines [wallacefund.info]) and I've raised many a toast to his memory!
Re:A wormhole into a can of worms? (Score:4, Informative)
One result of Wallace's early travels has been a modern controversy about his nationality. Since Wallace was born in Monmouthshire, some sources have considered him to be Welsh.[7] However some historians have questioned this because neither of his parents was Welsh, his family only briefly lived in Monmouthshire, the Welsh people Wallace knew in his childhood considered him to be English, and because Wallace himself consistently referred to himself as English rather than Welsh (even when writing about his time in Wales). One Wallace scholar has stated that because of these facts the most reasonable interpretation was that he was an Englishman born in Wales.[8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace [wikipedia.org]
I guess the real question is, could he become king of England?
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I guess the real question is, could he become king of England?
Well, no, cause he's dead.
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But wouldn't that make him an excellent king? Being dead, he can't become involved in any scandal, all his words can be re-interpreted as people wish, and all his misdeeds can be excused as fair for his time. It works for American Founding Fathers, so why not the King of England?
Even better would be a completely fictional person, a royal version of a virtual idol if you will. Almost all we get to see of real royals is
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Well, No. Because he's not German.
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I guess the real question is, could he become king of England?
As there is no such title, no he couldn't.
The current Queens' title is Queen of Great Britain [wikipedia.org]. And Wales is part of Great Britain (like Scotland).
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So - the title is up for grabs? I need to check into getting it for myself! I'm sure that Aunt Sophie would approve!
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"Did Victorian English ever use blunt language in writing?"
Of course they did. Otherwise words like "cad", "fop", and "dandy" wouldn't exist in their traditional sense in the English language. There's quite the collection of blunt insults that were used in the 19th century that have fallen out of fashion. Well, or in some cases, been re-tasked as words with slightly different meaning or as unfortunate acronyms.
Anyway, both Darwin and Wallace were gentlemen enough to write and publish a paper together abo
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Did Victorian English ever use blunt language in writing?
Of course they did. And you can bet that Elizabethan-era English certainly had its own share of insulting terms, though admittedly the term "expletives" wouldn't nearly cover all of the insults (they did better than the "Yo Mama!" joke.) http://www.renfaire.com/Language/insults.html [renfaire.com] is one site that gives a rather nice explanation about the sorts of terms used and occasionally why they might not be used any longer.
A bit exaggerated claims to a 2nd post? (Score:4, Interesting)
Been a while since I read an essay on "Origin", but as I recall Darwin was sitting on his works for quite a while. It was only after he learned that someone else was working on what he'd already accomplished that he decided to publish. Much like the way Newton had to be goaded into publishing the Principia.
Re:A bit exaggerated claims to a 2nd post? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not that Darwin was lazy, it was that the religious environment was such that one risked being fired for ticking off the religious establishments. It wasn't quite as bad as Galileo, but the same kind of forces.
Thus, he wanted the publication to be as water-tight as possible before releasing it; and that's one of the reasons why the work, for the most part, stands the test of time.
Blacklisted, not just "fired" (Score:1)
Correction, I should have said "blacklisted" instead of just "fired".
Isn't that term considered racist, though? Is there a P.C. replacement?
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there's nothing racist about the word "blacklisting" or "blacklisted."
Agreed. Incorrectly perceived racism is no reason to be niggardly with your vocabulary.
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Isn't that term considered racist, though? Is there a P.C. replacement?
I have a feeling that I missed the joke, but there's nothing racist about the word "blacklisting" or "blacklisted."
It is possible to argue that any phrase which uses "black" in a negative way is potentially unhelpful in reinforcing stereotypes in such words as "blacklisted", or "blackballed" or the concept of "black hat" and "white hat" cowboys or hackers.
In much the same way calling someone "a sinister ginger cunt" may be perceived as offensive on several levels.
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Correction, I should have said "blacklisted" instead of just "fired".
Isn't that term considered racist, though? Is there a P.C. replacement?
No, there is no P.C. replacement because blacklisting has nothing to do with race. From wWikipedia:
According to the Henry Holt Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins the word "blacklist" originated with a list England's King Charles II made of fifty-eight judges and court officers who sentenced his father, Charles I, to death in 1649. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, thirteen of these executioners were put to death and twenty-five sentenced to life imprisonment, while others escaped.
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It's not that Darwin was lazy, it was that the religious environment was such that one risked being fired for ticking off the religious establishments. It wasn't quite as bad as Galileo, but the same kind of forces.
Thus, he wanted the publication to be as water-tight as possible before releasing it; and that's one of the reasons why the work, for the most part, stands the test of time.
Except that is pure speculation. There is no evidence that Darwin delayed publishing because he was afraid of the religious establishments. Based on his other writings, one could construe that he was anything but afraid of the religious establishment.
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yes. I'm not an expert, but there was clearly some combination of physical and psychological illness, though there's nothing definitive on what. Even by the standards of gentleman scientists he was awfully slow, and you can argue that science was ill-served by his slowness.
And yeah, in mid-19th-century Britain you would be criticized by the religious establishment, but it's not like they could hurt him or deny him an audience. The dude was wealthy, and a near-recluse in any case.
Darwin was a great scient
Darwin's Delay Helped Wallace (Score:2)
if it wasn't for Darwin's delay, Wallace would probably only be known now to a handful of specialists.
Misleading headline (Score:2)
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Well - were you planning anything else for next month? Think of it, 28 days devoted to researching something you never really gave a damn about anyway. You'll only have to average ~143 letters per day, then you can go on about the business of your life in March.
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One has to read 4000 letters to find it.
One has to read the primary source and form an opinion. That's not a bad thing. It means you can form your own one.
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OK, I did it for you!
So, to save you time:
I think it's a fair assessment of the situation to say that Wallace did not think very highly of Darwin. This is apparent in letter number 3024 where he quite clearly states that if "[he met] Darwin he ... would pop a cap in his arse(sic)."
The Wallace Award (Score:3, Funny)
The Wallace Award is for people who would get a Darwin Award, but are slighted full recognition for their achievement.
Copyright of letters? (Score:5, Interesting)
The metadata for some random entry I clicked on reads like:
LETTER (WCP1.1)
A typical letter handwritten by author in English.
Held by: Natural History Museum
Finding number: NHM WP1/1/1
Copyright owner: Copyright of the A. R. Wallace Literary Estate
Record scrutiny: 01/12/2011 - Catchpole, Caroline;
I'm curious about the copyright field. Aren't the letters supposed to be public domain? Since Wallaced died in 1913, which is well past the 50-75 years after death clause of most countries' copyright regimes, shouldn't the copyright on the letters have lapsed already?
IANAL but I'm assuming that the letters have already been "published" by virtue of their having been snail-mailed and read by a second party. It's not as if they're some long-lost manuscript that's been hidden in some author's dusty drawer, which can arguably be considered as unpublished.
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I'm curious about the copyright field. Aren't the letters supposed to be public domain? Since Wallaced died in 1913, which is well past the 50-75 years after death clause of most countries' copyright regimes, shouldn't the copyright on the letters have lapsed already?
I know you can copyright a translation. Can you copyright a transcription? At least in the U.S. that seems unlikely to stand up in court because of the missing creative element, but it may well be that in other countries you can copyright such...
Seahawks (Score:2)
The correspondence of Alfred Russel Wallace has gone online for the first time.
I just saw Doug Flutie talking to him on the sideline at the Pro Bowl. Who knew he was so versatile.