I know, I know. He’s been done to death, but I realised this morning that I have been walking past this poster for some weeks now and it’s always pleased me. I think, somehow, it still seems a little… subversive .

Oh wait, I’ve just checked the poster and we’re 129 years too late. Damn. But if you had been in the Piccadilly area at 8 pm on Monday 16th Feb 1880, you could have attended his talk on ‘The characters by which dogs resemble and differ from other animals’, the first of a series of six lectures on ‘Dogs and their forefathers’. The whole series would have set you back a mere sixpence.

There was an old man from Downe, Kent Who found man arose by descent He said, “This may grate: But my friends we’re primate, Give thanks for life’s great accident!”

Charles Darwin Was a star in Eighteen fifty-nine His theory Caused a fury Among lovers of design “No Adam? Far too random – That’s never a solution!” But Charlie smiled – He was not riled: “Sorry, that’s evolution.”   It’s catching on, this Darwin thing.

Last week I took the train through a snowy landscape to Warwick University to give a seminar at the Department of Chemistry. I arrived a little early to catch up with a couple of virologist friends; in the coffee bar we chewed over funding politics and hot topics in viral replication. I met my hosts for lunch and a pleasant chat about common interests in serum albumin.

Abandoned

X.

This post is completely justified since crystals are a central topic at Reciprocal Space and I awoke this morning to a landscape covered with them: Snow has the wonderful property of making the world look fresh and new. Even the disaster area known locally as ‘our back garden’ manages to look appealing under its cold white blanket.

It’s over. And over a week ago at that. But I only finally caught up with the third and last episode of Prof Jim Al-Khalili’s BBC4 series Science and Islam last night. I flagged it up just before the series started and had been quite excited, having enjoyed Atom, Al-Khalili’s earlier documentary about the hey-day of physics in the early 20th century.

A discussion initiated by Katherine Haxton prompted me to check out ResearchBlogging.org and there I discovered the Virology Blog written by Vincent Racaniello. Vincent is a poliovirus researcher at Columbia University; I’d met him a few times while working on the same virus in Boston and it was nice to get back in touch. Racaniello definitely qualifies as a senior blogger, being a Professor of Microbiology and a very eminent virologist.

You choose, but both paths involve outrageous fortune. Me? I can’t figure it out. Until six months ago I had never heard of Richard Hamming, a masterful mathematician and computer scientist from Bell Labs. I’d heard of Bell Labs all right, a celebrated hot zone of physics and computational research and home to no less than six Nobel laureates. But of Hamming? Nothing.