Who steals this stuff?
If you want them because you care about enlightenment, wouldn't you also want them to be publicly accessible?
Charles Darwin notebooks lost and assumed stolen
11–20 of 123 posts
Re: Charles Darwin notebooks lost and assumed stolen
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess it is the same scenario with art pieces or similar products. EG, the Leonardo Da Vinci painting Salvator Mundi was sold for $450M back in 2017, where is the justification for this pricing?
I don't know. I don't know why I'm being downvoted either. It seems really fascinating. Is it an investment? A storage of wealth? Or did someone really decide they wanted that painting in their life instead of a brand new Boeing 747, for example? It's obviously not really worth that much, so what's it all about? Inflation is mainly due to money being creamed off into the hands of rich people, but all they are getting…
An item's market value is effectively defined by how much someone is willing to pay for it, rather than the material sum of its parts.
Re: Charles Darwin notebooks lost and assumed stolen
#13It seems really odd to me to say they are "worth many millions of pounds". Are there really people out there willing to make a sacrifice of many millions just to own these notebooks? And does that mean they were on the market all along? I find that really difficult to believe. We used to say things like this are priceless.
Buying these kind of collection pieces is tax efficient. So yes, people buy hugely expensive collector pieces all the time.
How so?
Re: Charles Darwin notebooks lost and assumed stolen
#14> The notebooks were last seen in November 2000... It was only during "a routine check" two months later that it was discovered they were missing. Why on earth is this just getting published now? The article reads like the library just found out they were missing.
Please fully read the article: Until circa 2017 the administration thought the notebooks were merely misplaced. As it's a tremendously large library that wasn't so difficult to believe, and numerous searches have been conducted over the years to locate the notebooks.
Only after a change of management they investigated the circumstances of the disappearing of the books more closely and came to the conclusion that it's more likely they were stolen.
Re: Charles Darwin notebooks lost and assumed stolen
#15The title should reflect the BBC's title "lost for 20 years"
The BBC frequently uses different titles in different places (home page, section page, article itself) and also changes them - the submission's title may well have reflected one of them at the time.
Re: Charles Darwin notebooks lost and assumed stolen
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess it is the same scenario with art pieces or similar products. EG, the Leonardo Da Vinci painting Salvator Mundi was sold for $450M back in 2017, where is the justification for this pricing?
I don't know. I don't know why I'm being downvoted either. It seems really fascinating. Is it an investment? A storage of wealth? Or did someone really decide they wanted that painting in their life instead of a brand new Boeing 747, for example? It's obviously not really worth that much, so what's it all about? Inflation is mainly due to money being creamed off into the hands of rich people, but all they are getting…
Paul Bloom had a brilliant TED-Talk on the matter, you might find it interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPicL1AWrs8
Re: Charles Darwin notebooks lost and assumed stolen
#17Who steals this stuff? If you want them because you care about enlightenment, wouldn't you also want them to be publicly accessible?
Apparently there are a lot of high net-worth individuals that take pleasure in acquiring such cultural goods to hang them in their private studies or re-sell them. The Nebra Sky Disk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk) was e.g. excavated by two "tomb raiders" who sold it on the black market, and only after the disk changed hands multiple times it was re-acquired by the federal government in a sting police operation (luckily).
It makes me sad to think about all the artifacts of e.g. the Byzantine and Babylonian cultures that were stolen during the recents wars in the middle east, most of it probably made it into the hands of wealthy collectors. At least we can hope that some of the stuff will turn up again, eventually, but since most people don't know how to properly keep these artefacts from decaying there's still a tremendous risk they will be permanently damaged.
Re: Charles Darwin notebooks lost and assumed stolen
#18> The notebooks were last seen in November 2000... It was only during "a routine check" two months later that it was discovered they were missing. Why on earth is this just getting published now? The article reads like the library just found out they were missing.
Please fully read the article: Until circa 2017 the administration thought the notebooks were merely misplaced. As it's a tremendously large library that wasn't so difficult to believe, and numerous searches have been conducted over the years to locate the notebooks. Only after a change of management they investigated the circumstances of the disappearing of the books more closely and came to the conclusion that it's…
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Re: Charles Darwin notebooks lost and assumed stolen
#19The title should reflect the BBC's title "lost for 20 years"
The BBC frequently uses different titles in different places (home page, section page, article itself) and also changes them - the submission's title may well have reflected one of them at the time.
Also the tag is often different from the readable title in (the HN bookmarklet picks up the title tag). And that's throughout many news organizations. CNN does that all the time.
Re: Charles Darwin notebooks lost and assumed stolen
#20[deleted]