Yay, yay, it's Darwin Day

Which means the print edition of The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder, and Evolution is FINALLY out!

Chris Lynch informs us that the book is slowly making its way through the bowels of various online retailers, including Amazon.com. In the meantime, the print version is available from Lulu.com for US$24.95 + postage.

All the details are on the Tangled Bank Press website: http://tangledbankpress.com.au/. Readers can read both the introduction and Christopher Green's story Darwin's Daughter for free. In addition, readers who buy a print copy in the next month will receive the ebook for free. Yes FREE!!! There's even a competition - you can win a copy of the ebook by following @thetangledbank on Twitter.

Chris Lynch has also posted an interview with Sean Williams about his haiku sequence The Origin of Haiku By Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Renga in the Struggle for Meaning, around which the anthology is structured. It provides a map of Darwin’s book Origin of Species, chapter by chapter, using Darwin's own phrases to capture the arguments he was working through, while at the same time illustrating the evolution of the haiku form down the centuries.

Anyway, get your copy now. You won't be sorry,

Baking for biodiversity

February 12th 2011 is Darwin's 202nd birthday (or would be if he were alive) and nothing quite says happy birthday like a "Host Dependant Replicate" cake or a "A Phylogenetic Tree of Darwin's Books" made up of cupcakes.

Each year, to celebrate Charles Darwin's birthday, the Beaty Biodiversity Museum organizes a contest in which participants create cakes in honour of Darwin and his achievements.

Go here to see a few results of the "Bake a Cake for Darwin Contest".

I'm not so sure about the "Primordial Pudding" entry, but please, cut me a slice of that venomous coral snake. Or is it the copycat species you're about to knife?