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interestica

Luckily: "The two Darwin notebooks had previously been digitised and their content is available online." .

University of Cambridge has a bit more on their "appeal" site (https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/DarwinAppeal)

The digitized notebooks are available:

[1] https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00121/1

[2] https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00122/1

Also, yesterday was the anniversary of the release of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life on November 24, 1859.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species

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I believe it is important to keep the physical version at a safe place for as long as possible. How long before a new wave of "flat earthers" decides the digital version is just a deep fake and it never existed?

I suspect 10-20 years ago?

They'll say the physical version is a fake too.

Though I say for really important works, having a physical copy in addition to the digital one is a must. Digital data is easy to copy — and easy to lose. And bit rot is a thing.

well it is important, that the digitized version can be traced back to the original.

Why is it important? So we can show that it couldn't have been faked after the digitizing process?

Something else important w/r/t keeping originals: Who could have foreseen that our new imaging technology would allow us to read the otherwise-unreadable original text of palimpsests, or the insides of scrolls too brittle to unroll?

What other discoveries might be unpredictable right now? For example, some new development might tell us two things were made in the same place and time, leading to discovery by inference, or something.

Originals might prove valuable in ways not yet known.

I wouldn't trust them with the physical copy to verify it, so I don't know that it makes a difference.

Flat earthers are lunatics, and you have to ask the question who the bigger fool is: The fool or the on who tries to argue with the fool.

I don't believe anyone has ever convinced a flatearther with reason.

This is good to hear, and a reminder of how important it is to keep backups of everything.

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