Charles Darwin Gets Cyber and Online

Some people wake up to the sound of an alarm clock. Others to music, ocean sounds or the dog licking their face. I wake up to National Public Radio. As I break my way into consciousness, my mind gets a bit more stretched with information and stories that I would otherwise never have learned about.

This morning, the first thing I heard was that on the first day Cambridge University launched their new site dedicated to Charles Darwin, they had over 7 MILLION hits, crashed their smokin' servers several times and had over 14,000 downloads of the pdf version of the Origin of Species. The documents (over 20,000 of them) had previously only been available in person at Cambridge. Documents range from handwritten recipes, to theory rewrites, to the pros and cons of marriage. Who wouldn't want a peek into the mind of the very real man whose observations of variety of birds sparked a revolution of insight into the science of evolution?