Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

The Royal Society of London has posted the audio from an October lecture with Alison Pearn of the Darwin Correspondence Project, “‘We are arriving at very curious results’: Charles Darwin and the practice of science”:

He never wore a lab coat, and is famous principally for a theory, yet Charles Darwin’s contribution to scientific method is considerable and often overlooked. Working surrounded by his family in an ordinary Victorian country house he devised ingenious experiments on everything from human expression to insectivorous plants, worked out the taxonomy of barnacles, and observed unsuspected behaviours in organisms from ants to earthworms. In devising some of the most influential ideas ever formulated, he used everything that came to hand from the vegetables in the kitchen garden, to the drugs prescribed for his stomach complaints, and, along the way, he pioneered the use of the scientific questionnaire, and conducted perhaps the first ever recorded…

by Ben Belton and Simon Bush

So how many people realise that more than half the fish eaten by human beings will very soon come from aquaculture? The answer may well depend on where you live, which raises a series of questions about the geography of where and how farmed fish are produced and consumed.

The rise of aquaculture over the last four decades has been as uneven as our understanding of its development. Our recent paper published in The Geographical Journal, explores this apparent deficit in knowledge about aquaculture by asking whether geographers have responded in any substantial way to a call to arms published by Barton and Stanifordt in Area in 1996 urging them to do just this.

Our results are not as positive as one might hope. While a potential global deficit in food fish has been averted by the growth of the industry, geography’s contributions…

अभी ज्यादा समय नहीं बीता जब एक दिन यह ज्ञात हुआ के नई दिल्ली में स्थित तथाकथित अग्रसेन की बावली को अगरवाल समाज के हवाले कर दिया गया है क्योंकि उन्होंने ए एस आई से यह कहा था के इस बावली का निर्माण महाराजा अग्रसेन ने किया था जो अगरवाल समाज के संस्थापक थे. उनका कहना था कि इसलिए अगरवाल समाज बावली की देखभाल करना चाहता है – आखिर बावली उनके संस्थापक की यादगार जो है. ए एस आई ने विधिवत ढंग से एक एम ओ यू (इकरारनामा) तैयार किया दोनों पक्षों ने उस पर हस्ताक्षर किये और बावली अग्रवाल समाज के हवाले कर दी गयी.

अग्रवाल समाज को शायद उस शिलालेख से भी ऐतराज़ था जो बावली के बाहर ए एस आई ने लगाया हुआ था और ऐतराज़ वाजिब भी था अग्रवाल समाज का “विश्वास” है के बावली महाराज अग्रसेन की बनवाई हुई थी और शिलालेख पर, जहाँ तक…