I am deeply grateful to Darwin College Cambridge for organising a wonderful set of Darwin Lectures in this the year of Darwin excess. I’m even more grateful that they recorded them in reasonably high quality and made them available over the intertubes. And not just available, but easily available as a podcast that I can subscribe to through iTunes U.

So what am I building up to?

This: come on guys! How hard would it have been to have given us the images too? I don’t need the whole TedTalk multi-camera TV show manqué. Heck, I don’t even need to see the speaker’s lips move. But nor do I want to listen to them telling me to look at this green block of sequence, or those cute owlish eyes, or the other little known picture of the Beagle while I remain stubbornly in the dark. It’s even worse when the audience laughs uproariously at what’s on the screen. I feel so ... neglected.

How hard would it have been to get the slides and sync them up to the talk? Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Tell you what, send me the presentations and I’ll do it for you, Darwin College. Tomorrow.

P.S. I'm even sadder to discover, after exercising due diligence in researching the links, that the “videos” are also black blanks. The link says "watch online", but why would I want to watch a black rectangle? Is it just me? I don’t believe so.

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