Worst. Idea. Ever.

I started writing this over two months ago, but then Life Got In The Way and so on. For some reason, even though this had been on arXiv since June, the media only picked up on it in mid-November, and my bestest friend Usch sent me the BBC news article: "Diamonds produced from tequila.

What a waste of the greatest drink known to man! The only thing I can think of is that the authors had a very large night on tequila, vowed never to drink again, and, rather than chucking it down the sink (as I am afraid I did with my first bottle of tequila - a rookie error which I regret to this day) they decided to stick it in the experiment to see what happened.

And while I appreciate the diamonds are industrial grade, if someone said to me: "You can either have this diamond or the amount of tequila we used to make this diamond", I'd go for the tequila every single time. There's a tiny, tiny bit of me that would be curious to have a diamond made from tequila just for bragging rights, but that really isn't a good reason to destroy tequila.


But seriously, I'm not convinced this is such a good idea. A couple of weeks ago, an article appeared in New Scientist, briefly discussing the environmental strain put on the Jalisco region of Mexico by giving tequila a "geographical indication". Agave tequilana is not that fast growing a plant (trust me on this one!).


I'm not sure how much tequila is needed to make the diamonds, but when you consider how many plants must go into each bottle of José Cuervo, these diamonds have quite a high environmental cost. If diamond production becomes a more profitable business than making tequila for human consumption, could it not put the region under considerable pressure?

I'm just throwing out possibilities here. I am sure diamonds can be produced from less tasty, less geographically specific spirits, although I honestly believe diamond production would be the best thing that could happen to a bottle of single malt scotch whisky...

We Are So Screwed

Paul spotted this on the BBC news feed, and I went looking for the press release (having failed to find the actual paper - must be out later today).

New Study Shows Climate Change Largely Irreversible

This was the scariest paragraph for me:

The study notes that decreases in rainfall that last not just for a few decades but over centuries are expected to have a range of impacts that differ by region. Such regional impacts include decreasing human water supplies, increased fire frequency, ecosystem change and expanded deserts.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The Earth will get through this. A lot of organisms will become extinct, the planet may be sick for a long time but nature will prevail.

It's the human race that is not going to survive. If the complete inability to grow crops doesn't get us it'll be the bitter wars over drinking water. Which is fine if you're a member of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, but sucks if you give a damn about your own legacy.

One More Push To Number One

Come on folks - Amanda is so close to winning that scholarship! Show that cuddly Brontosauruses are so much better than X-Box 360s or pants board games that have been entered purely for marketing purposes.

What's Your Favorite Toy? Brickfish

The competition runs until late night on Valentine's Day, so keep voting. And if you normally click through to my website, consider voting direct from your blog feed aggregator, as that will count as another site, and Amanda can get her "most viral" rating up that way.

Thank you all! More nagging over the next two weeks...

Book Review: Dry Store Room No. 1

I was truly horrified and disgusted with myself to discover that, last year, I read precisely one book for pleasure, and that was the diabolical "Lipstick Jungle" by Candace Bushnell. So while it wasn't an official new year's resolution, I have decided I need to read more books for fun. And I thought I'd better start with a book that I took all the way to SVP with me and then failed to read at all.


"Dry Store Room No. 1" by Richard Fortey is a book I wish had been written in September 2002, when I first stepped through the doors of the Natural History Museum as a research student. It is an incredibly valuable history of the people who worked at the NHM for well over 100 years, and really should be issued to all new employees as mandatory induction reading.

For example, when I inherited Garth Underwood's space in the herpetology lab less than a week after his death, I might have been a little more humble when considering his legacy. I'd certainly have taken my fielding position in lab cricket a lot more seriously! I'd have gone looking for the mysterious door with the sign on saying "Departmental Cock", if only to have my photo taken with it. I think I would have followed Fortey's example and gone exploring a lot more often, as I think I managed to know my way to and from the Palaeontology and Entomology departments, the Darwin Centre, and the tiny classroom that served as the base for the parallel taught masters to my research degree.

I did feel as though I had missed out on a bit - that I had spent a year in a marvellous institution and barely scratched the surface. But I perhaps would not have appreciated the book as much if I'd read it without knowing of some of the protagonists. There are some stories missing from the collection, which must have been fairly famous because I, a lowly masters student, was trusted with the legends. I always forget which respected pillar of the scientific community, when asked what ostrich tasted like, said "Rather like okapi", and would have loved to know the full background of that character.

Because I'm biased, I wanted more stories about the dinosaurologists, past and present. But dinosaur science is a very tiny part of the overall research that goes on behind the scenes, and any visitor to the NHM should be in no doubt that the percentages of the public galleries given over to each group of organisms are in no way proportional to the number of researchers on each taxon. And Fortey's book does a great deal to put the botanists, the entomologists, the invertebrate zoologists and the invertebrate palaeontologists back in the spotlight.

My recommendation would certainly be that, if you're planning on visiting the NHM in and around the Bristol SVP meeting, buy this book and make sure you actually read it in and around the trip. It'd be an excellent companion. And, if you're lucky enough to score a visit to the collections, then it'll give you something to think about as you have your morning tea in the fish library, watched over by the smiling gaze of Colin Patterson.

Words That Made Me Smile

Today I heard the most powerful man in the world say:

We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Welcome back, America. We've missed you.

Theropods Of London

Last week I had a chance to stroll through St James's Park. As well as getting incandescent at the municipal planting scheme, I was able to get up close and personal to some dinosaurs. And it looked as though there were some exotic winter visitors.


This chap was rather luridly coloured. I didn't get a good shot of his head, and I'm not sure of the species. His ladyfriends were a little duller:


Red-crested pochards (Netta rufina) were the second most common duck on the lake (after the mallards). Here were five males cleaning themselves:


This gorgeous little bar-headed goose (Anser indicus) was very happy to be photographed, and even allowed me to stroke its back.


I'm so proud of the last photo. It was taken with my mobile phone, which only has a digital zoom (so I try not to use the zoom at all). So I actually had my phone right in the goose's face. I know I'm a child of the late 20th century, and I'm pretty good with technology, but it does sometimes blow my mind that I'm making phone calls, listening to the radio, surfing the net and taking high-quality photos with a piece of kit that is smaller than my old calculator that would only go up to 99999999.

Anyway. It was good to see them all enjoying the cold weather. They didn't seem overly bothered by all the ice on the lake, although I will say that it's even funnier watching ducks trying to skate than it is watching humans.

The Atheist Bus Campaign

Here's something that will put a smile on the face of my parenthetical friend in Pennsylvania, and is the best way I can say Happy Birthday (((Billy))).


Used with kind permission, © Jon Worth / British Humanist Association

I'm not going to go into a long explanation of the Atheist Bus Campaign, as much as anything because you should go to their website and in particular read their FAQ which gives you the whole background. Suffice to say, it has done exactly what it aimed to do. Everyone is talking about it. The only people who seem to be really hopping mad about it are one fairly staunch Christian group, Christian Voice. They've complained to the Advertising Standards Agency on the basis of "substantiation and truthfulness".

Good luck to them! And good luck to the ASA being asked to rule on the probable existence of God.

The best quote is from Stephen Green:

There is plenty of evidence for God, from people's personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world.

May I offer this alternative?

There is plenty of evidence against God, from people's personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world.

The Atheist Bus campaign has been a roaring success. It has had far more publicity from the supposed "outrage" of the religious right than it could have had with press releases alone. And it's got people talking.

Specifically, it's got people saying: if this is supposedly offending the religious, just think about how offensive it for the areligious to see posters telling us that Jesus is risen, that we are saved and that if we don't believe we're going to burn in Hell.

I am returning to work tomorrow, and I am very much looking forward to catching sight of the new tube adverts. I especially like the Douglas Adams quote:

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Paul, ever the master of rhetoric and of being far better at philosophy and theology than I have ever been, said:

"The garden is beautiful but some of us might like to get to know the gardener."

I'll give him that, but I reckon it's a self-sown garden.

You Smell Of Poopies And I'm Right

Oh deep joy. Yesterday, I said:

If I get any comments back from J Hunter (suspicious as I am of anyone whose e-mail address includes the word "Alabama"), I suspect they'll be of the form "You smell of poopies and I'm right".

As I'm sure you have guessed, J Hunter did respond, and it was of the form I predicted.

1. I didn't know I was "haranguing" a woman,

Well, yes, as Paul has pointed out, I do have a "Blogs by Women" banner on my sidebar, and I am a member of Bust's Girl Wide Web. I shall henceforth aim to do all my posts wearing nothing but Victoria's Secret lingerie so it is more obvious that I am a gurl. Would a few topless pictures help?

2. I see no point made at all to dissprove what I posted, so I don't see where I was handed anything much less my ass.

There must be some kind of filter in your part of the Boondocks stopping scientific reasoning from getting through. A bit like how China block the BBC News website. I made it as clear as I possibly could. A lot of my colleagues have done the same thing against your fellow expanding-earthers and it's as though whenever a scientific concept comes along you stick your fingers in your ears and sing "La la la" very loudly. What more can we do? Show us where the geological concepts of erosion, deposition, superposition and isostasy are wrong and show it comprehensively.

3. The facts have already been out there for years, its just those that have "tunnell vision" that choose to believe what someone tells them instead of listening to common sense, which by the way is just as important as "book" sense!

My book sense tells me that 30,000 divided by 5.5 is 5,455. My book sense tells me that density = mass divided by volume. Do you accept these facts? Or have I just chosen to believe what someone told me about simple arithmetic and the laws of physics? So-called common sense tells us to "keep the cold out" in the winter. Science tells us to "keep the heat in" in the winter. Do you want a central heating system that keeps the cold out or keeps the heat in? Think carefully about the cost of heating fuel.

And you know what, Paul did such a good job of telling you every way your paving slab hypothesis is grossly flawed, that I don't need to bother. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data", and even if you were on to something that would revolutionise the way we think about plate tectonics, geological processes and even the laws of physics, you need to have testable hypotheses. You need observations backed up by statistical support. You need to be able to hold your own against the people with whom you disagree. You and your fellow expanding earthers have repeatedly shown that, when you are faced with the science all you can do is deny that we said anything of worth and then tell us that we aren't using common sense.

I could have laughed in your face and refused to engage, but I did. And I did it at a level that you should understand. Please do me the courtesy of responding similarly.

No Brainers: Expanding Earth "Theory"

Oh wow. Sometimes the stupidity of people surpasses my expectations. I just got a comment on a post I wrote about the Expanding Earth "Theory" nearly two years ago. I'm really hoping the rest of the geoblogosphere will crack open a beer and enjoy this next bit.

It would take a complete moron not to realize that the earth is in fact expanding, and i'm not talking about from the inside out, blah blah.

Do you ever find yourself faced with a mound of bullshit so high you almost don't know where to start? Let's try with a couple of sentences at a time, and maybe I can get through it all. I'm probably on a hiding to nothing, because expanding-earthers have this annoying habit of not accepting science, just like creationists. The normal rules of engagement as far as the debate goes don't apply to expanding-earthers and creationists - they refuse to accept logical arguments, they attribute causal relationships to coincidences and vice versa. If I get any comments back from J Hunter (suspicious as I am of anyone whose e-mail address includes the word "Alabama"), I suspect they'll be of the form "You smell of poopies and I'm right". Here goes...

They have to dig to find the lost city, T-Rex, building foundation, or skeleton that they ’re looking for. Look at the layers on the walls of the grand canyon, at one point in time each of those layers were on top.

So here we have someone who does not understand that sedimentary rocks form from the eroded particles from existing igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks. They do not understand the principle of isostasy, where mountains are buoyed up like a heavy boat on a lake. They do not understand the closed system that is the rock cycle. And that's truly tragic because the rock cycle is taught at the equivalent of junior high school level in the UK.


A really simple diagram of the rock cycle from Pull Out The Plug, an age 11-14 science revision site.

All the sediment in the Grand Canyon came from elsewhere on the Earth. There is a conservation of material within the system - possibly even a loss of volatiles through volcanism. The Grand Canyon did not conjure up material. We obey the laws of physics in this universe. This is right up there with someone I dealt with a few years ago who thought the mass of the Earth had increased when all the water fell in the Biblical flood.

Okay, on to the next bit.

If plant matter such as a blade of grass grows, then dies, it becomes part of the topsoil beneath the new growth. That matter does not simply “go away� just because the plant died. New grass grows in its place, dies and the process is repeated over and over.

And this is a basic failure to understand the carbon cycle, which is something I was taught in elementary school. Plant matter is broken down by bacteria and carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and nutrients into the soil. These are taken up by the next plant to grow there.


Another really simple diagram, this time of the carbon cycle, from somewhere in the depths of the Woods Hole Research Center website.

We are made up of atoms that have been in millions, if not billions of organisms before they formed us. We take in carbon every day from our food. Plants take in carbon in the form of carbon dioxide, and convert it to starch to build structure. This joker has completely forgotten about decay, as they had forgotten about erosion, isostatic rebound, sedimentation and all the everyday geological processes we take for granted. If we didn't have decay, and organisms that eat our waste (whether it is our exhaled gases, our faeces or our corpses), we would be surrounded by the incorruptible bodies of our ancestors. That is, if all the free oxygen hadn't been sequestered, suffocating the planet...

Meteorites strike the earth hundreds of thousands of times per day. Most are small and get vaporized in the earths atmosphere. But that matter does not disappear, it falls to the earth as dust etc. Nasa estimates vary between how much TONS of matter fall to earth EVERY DAY.

This is beginning to move away from my area of expertise. However, the most common estimate I have found is 30,000 tonnes of dust per year. Let us assume also that the dust has a density equal to that of the Earth, some 5.5 tonnes/m³.

Now, I'm going to have some margin of error here (and let me make it very clear that it's going to be on a negligible scale), because I can't be bothered to work it out by increase of volume of the earth (can't find my scientific calculator anyway). If we assume that the surface area of the Earth is a totally flat disc of area 510,000,000 km² (a rounded version of the surface area of the Earth referenced on Wikipedia, and you can shut the fuck up flat-Earthers), then we can make a calculation. Mass over density equals volume. So 30,000 tonnes divided by 5.5 tonnes/m³ is 5,455 m³. 5,455 m³ would mulch my garden for a few years, I suppose...

But hey, let's carry it through to its conclusion. Let's divide the volume by the area to get the thickness of dust deposited in one year. 5,455 m³ divided by 510,000,000 km² (or 510,000,000,000,000 m²). That's 1.07 x 10^-11 m. Or 10.7 pm thickness of space dust deposited per year. The diameter of a carbon atom is 154.4 pm (radius is 77.2 pm). It's going to take nearly 15 years to cover the Earth with dust the thickness of a single carbon atom. So, over the past 3.8 billion years (approximate time since the Late Heavy Bombardment), 40,660,000,000 pm of space dust (or thereabouts) has been dropped on the Earth.

41 mm. That's less than two inches. Tops. Are you really trying to base the entire Expanding Earth "Theory" on a length of measurement that, if it was a penis, would be classified as a medical deformity?

And this isn't even including the mass we are losing as atmospheric particles escape the Earth's gravity. And finally:

if the earth didn't expand you'd NEVER HAVE TO DIG SOMETHING UP!
i'm sorry but its a no-brainer there.

So nothing has ever been buried? No graves were dug, no bodies sunk six feet below? No roads built on top of previous roads?


No landslides have ever buried anything? No sediment floods a flat fertile region close to a river? No turbidites cascade down into the abyssal plain? The Mississippi carries no sediment out into its delta? Come on, you're from south of the Mason-Dixon. You must know how muddy the Mississippi is!

It is a no-brainer, J Hunter, but not in the way you think.

More Than Many Americans

Will has done an update of the states he's visited, so I thought I'd do the same.



Visited 31 states (62%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

Not bad, not bad. You can see the places that are on the To-Do list for the next few trans-Atlantic holidays. If SVP can arrange a meeting in Bozeman, Anchorage, Maui, Nashville, New Orleans and Atlanta, that'd be good, thanks. I'm gutted that I missed out on a trip to Kansas while I was in St Louis. That state in the middle there, with all the others around it visited, just annoys me.

I've prided myself on being better travelled in the US than a lot of Americans I know. This surprises me, because the Brits consider a journey of two hours to be a major day trip, whereas according to Bill Bryson an American will drive that far for a burger or a gallon of milk. And the majority of this has been done by car.

Having said that, my European and world travel is pitiful.



Visited 8 states (3.55%)
Create your own visited map of The World

So I've shown you mine, you show me yours.

Body Parts In The Garden

I looked out of the lounge window this morning and said "Huh. There appears to be a head of femur in the flower bed". As you do.


Definitely mammalian. Too small to be human. My first thought was that it was from a fox, as we've got quite a lot round here (I think they're living in our basement). But once I actually picked it up to look at it, it was clear that it hadn't been naturally predated, as the femur was sharply and diagonally cut, not shattered or broken.


So my thoughts are that it's pig or sheep. Probably scavenged by the foxes from someone's bin in the area and picked clean of meat and the best part of the marrow. I'm no good on cuts of meat though, so if anyone's a butcher or knows a butcher, which animal would be cut so that the head of femur was included in the chop?

Why We Need More Scientific Literacy #11

Detox is bollox. And now the wonderful organisation Sense About Science has carried out an investigation to show this, all reported on the BBC news website.

Regular readers will know that I am quite a fan of Radio 4, and in particular the Today programme. Paul and I were listening to the show, when Dr Ben Goldacre (if you don't subscribe to his blog Bad Science you are missing out on something quite special) was invited on to help with the debunking.

And debunk he did, quite comprehensively. You can read his blog post on the subject (published an hour after his slot on the programme) on his website, and there's a handy link to the audio segment so you can hear the managing director of the "Detox in a box" squirm and deny what is written on her own shoddily put together website.

I commented:

Even before checking the scientific claims, I would on principle never buy anything from a website with such a poor command of the English language. From the same page you got "cadminum":

"However, our bodily functions were designed when the world were less polluted."

"Yet we are helping in anyway to our organs and systems to do their job more effectively."

I don’t even know what she means to say in that second quote!

At the Science Blogging 2008 conference back in August, I believe Ben referred to this sort of thing as a "voluntary tax on human stupidity" - ultimately if you want to spend £16.50 per day having supposed detox food delivered to your door, when you could go to the farm shop and buy £16.50 of vegetables, lasting you a month and being better for you, then it's your money. I have no problem with the great British public buying up all the goji berries in the western hemisphere - hey, it supports the goji berry farmers. My dad has a similar philosophy, that "there's always someone at the bottom of the economic food chain".

However, if you do happen to have £16.50 a day to spend on pseudoscientific bullshit, might I suggest that if you give me £16.50 a day you won't get cancer because the good karma will form a protective forcefield around you and stop the cancer germs getting in? FACT.

Top Nature Moments Of 2008

This is a toughie. Especially after my rather woeful navel-gazing at the end of 2008. But good to focus on the positives and show you some of my highlights, as Tai Haku has done. Here are my top nature moments from last year.

1. Enjoying the spring daffodils in Green Park, in the middle of London:


2. Getting a whole flock of long-tailed tits in the garden in September.

3. Spotting my first "wild" Metasequoia glyptostroboides, buying my own, and then seeing them absolutely everywhere:


4. Returning to my geological mapping area for an afternoon and remembering every single outcrop:


5. Embarking on a skeletonisation project with a kindly donated wood pigeon carcass.

6. Getting to see the famous fall colours of New England:


7. Seeing awesome right-angled jointing in ?Devonian shales:


8. Spotting my first black squirrel:


9. Showing Paul Niagara Falls for the first time (my third visit):


10. And finally, welcoming a field mouse into Jurassic Park for an afternoon (photo by Paul)!


I'm delighted to report that I've already kicked off the year with what I hope will be one of my highlights of 2009 - yesterday on the way back from Kew, Paul and I got off the bus early and walked the last mile home. We wandered up a lane lined by hedgerows on each side, and I saw a tiny bird darting about. I thought it was a wren, but on closer inspection it was actually a goldcrest! The goldcrest is Britain's smallest bird, and although supposedly widespread, this was only the second one I have ever seen.

Go 2009!