Dammit Jim!

I just added a new book to the Darwin du Jour site. A Naturalist’s Voyage Round The World (also known as Voyage of the Beagle) is Darwin’s log of his travels on the H.M.S. Beagle. I just started reading it myself but it looks like a pretty interesting look at the history of the regions, the old methods of biology and, of course, how Darwin came up with the idea of natural selection. Project Gutenberg again provided the base text (html in this case) although I had to do a bit of conversion to make it look decent.

I’ve been meaning to read Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species for quite a while. Unfortunately, I’m always busy. I came across The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci RSS which seemed nice although it’s a little unfulfilling to read a sketchbook in plain text. This got me thinking that that would be a nice way to read other books. Project Gutenberg has Origin of the Species (and many other books) available for free download. I thought converting this text into RSS might provide a nice way to read books a bit at a time. Since I just got the fancy new sherrillmix.com domain name I thought I could practice a little php and make something useful for myself and possibly for others. So if you’ve never read The Origin of Species and want to have an educational RSS feed please visit Darwin du Jour.

I was making an favicon for the Darwin’s Origin of Species RSS feed site I’m putting together, when I realized I was fulfilling a creationist stereotype. If you too would like to have an Icon of Evolution, here are a 16×16 favicon and a 16,32,64-pixel Darwin icon files. (On Windows: Download the bigger one, Right-click a folder, go to Customize, click Change Icon and select darwin.ico)