These are sources for the transcripts of “Parrots, the Universe and Everything”, one of the last public appearances of Douglas Adams, recorded by the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2001 shortly before his dead. In this lecture he talks about his experiences researching and writing for his book, Last Chance to See, coauthored with Mark Carwardine.

• The full transcript in English, with additional notes and hyperlinks. Rendered directly from the sources in this repository.

• The subtitled video in amara.org. Currently there are subtitles in English, Spanish, French, and Greek. There you can also contribute providing translations into other languages.

• The original video on YouTube, kindly provided by UCSB.

• August 2019. nokyotsu makes a few tweaks to the sources, and updates the rendering mechanism (a customised mistune for markdown parsing and jinja templates). The rendered page is now made available at nokyotsu.github.io/parrots.

• August 2015. nokyotsu moves the sources of the transcript into this public github repository. Further editions to the transcript, or translations into other languages, can be added as pull requests.

• August 2015. arnauld syncs the transcript to provide English subtitles at amara.org.

• August 2014. The transcript site is moved to nokyotsu.com/parrots/. The previous link still works, but now it's just a redirect.

• March 2013. maldoreur starts the first Greek translation and syncs subtitles with the UCSB video at amara.org.

• June 2011. nokyotsu publishes a series of blog posts at Pedazos de Carbono translating the transcript into Spanish: el aye-aye, Komodo, el kakapo, el baiji, and el humano.

• May 2011. Nearly a year after the project started the transcript was all completed by anonymous contributors. Although there were no more missing bits in the text, small fixes and additional improvements kept arriving throughout the years.

• July 2010. Already a month after starting the project the first edits, from anonymous contributors over the internet, started coming in.

• June 2010. nokyotsu wrote the first basic draft of the transcript in English. Although mostly complete, this first version was far from perfect—not being a native speaker there were a few places where he couldn't get the precise words from Douglas, and some misspellings invariably slipped through.

  As an experiment in ‘openness’ he made the sources of the transcript publicly editable, so by-passers could contribute adding the missing pieces and generally improving the transcript. The backend, hosted at navarroj.com/parrots, was just a bunch of messy perl scripts on top of svn.