As promotional tactics go, it’s up there with kicking puppies.
Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator”.
That’s a nicely disgusting example, possibly even more so than the parasitic wasps that Darwin used in making the same argument:
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.
Link
This is the cover art for Penguin’s 150th Anniversary Edition of On the Origin of Species, which was painted by Damien Hirst:
The painting sits firmly in the tradition of “still life” and is made up of objects I’ve come to imbue with my own meanings, some of them Darwinian in origin, and that I guess are seen in other areas of my work. The painting has an X-ray-like quality to it, as if it is revealing something about the structure of the objects painted.
I suppose the work, in a modest way, acknowledges Darwin’s analytical mind and his courage to believe in those ideas that questioned the very fabric of existence and belief in his time.
Even so, I think I prefer the Vintage Classics version:
Either way, a book cover is nothing without a bit of Wordart.
Lynne Bradley, chief executive of the British Library, on the importance of archiving Internet pages for historical purposes:
At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House website, replaced by images of and speeches by his successor. Attached to the website had been a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration – they may never know them now. When the website changed, the link was broken and the booklet became unavailable.
The 2000 Sydney Olympics was the first truly online games with more 150 websites, but these sites disappeared overnight at the end of the games and the only record is held by the National Library of Australia.
These are just two examples of a huge challenge that faces digital Britain. There are approximately 8 million .uk domain websites and that number grows at a rate of 15-20% annually. The scale is enormous and the value of these websites for future research and innovation is vast, but online content is notoriously ephemeral.
If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics – perhaps exacerbated by the current economic climate that is killing companies – the memory of the nation disappears too. Historians and citizens of the future will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century.
I for one would love the ability to cite archived and dated versions of my websites in my work. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine does a fairly good job of archiving particular sites, but isn’t particular user-friendly or searchable by anything other than URL. Perhaps a project such as Zoetrope will solve this problem?
Link
If you love this site (and why wouldn’t you?), you might like my new site on Tumblr, called Self-published Books. Because, y’know, the Internet doesn’t have enough snarky websites already.
After the Elements of Style, the Elements of Spam:
14. Use the active voice.
Notice how aloof the passive voice is.
‘Your balls are to be slurped the most by cum-starved nymphos!!!!!’
Hardly persuasive.
Link [via]