Was Carl Sagan really all that?

Chris and Sheril have a new book out on scientific failures to communicate. I haven't read it, as it was not available in my local bookstore here in Oz. Fortunately, here in blog land, my failure to even see the book qualifies me to review it. From what I'm told, the late Carl Sagan is used as an example of a great science communicator. Trouble is, my local bookstore didn't have any of his books either. Lomborg and Plimer, yes, but no Mooney or Carl.

A lot of scientists enthusiastically cite Sagan as one of the inspirations for their careers. And that is fine. But here's the thing. Sagan was a great preacher, sure. But for the most part, he preached to the choir. Welders and car dealers aren't nearly as excited about him as astronomers are. So when it comes to finding a way to bridge the gap between science and the technophopic world, he is probably not the best example. In fact, I'm not really sure who is. but I reckon that the late Steve Irwin would be in the running.

Geologic bad habits

I am far from a perfect geologist. One of my most annoying habits, both to my self later on and to my colleagues, is that I often forget to put a scale bar in my field photos. Obviously not knowing the size of various features results in substantial information loss, so this is something that I tried to specifically address during our 2008 field season.

The one item that we don’t leave the truck without is a GPS. For one thing, all data has to be tied to a location point- there’s no point taking a picture of the biggest gold nugget evah if we don’t know where it is. And secondly, in areas on subdued topography, incomplete drainage, and/or thick scrub, the GPS is the best tool for finding one’s way back to the vehicle. So, I decided that the obvious thing to do was to add a scalebar to my receiver. Here’s the result.


Figure 1. slickensides and veining in sandstone. GPS gradations are centemeters.

Do any of y’all have geologic habits bad enough to necessitate the use of pink paint markers?

p.s. Kim, Sinistral?

This could have been me

My PhD work involved fieldwork in East-central Brazil. After about a year of correspondence with a geologist at the Bahia state survey who was an expert on the stratigraphy, the plan was for me to accompany him into the field. As someone who had worked in the area for decades, he was in charge of the logistics, while I, the student from the top notch analytical school, was in charge of all geochemical and geochronological analyses.

That was the plan.

My flight into Salvador arrived at 12:30 am. When my collaborator met me at the airport, he informed me that he would no longer be taking part in the project, and that I was basically on my own. That I eventually managed to get samples and results (the writing up of which is the reason this blog is on autopilot) was a miracle. But it was pure luck that I didn’t end up like these guys.

For those of you who don’t read All my Faults are Stress Related, or Arizona Geology, five students, three American and two Brazilian, were recently arrested for geological sampling without the proper paperwork. The Americans are required to stay in Brazil until legal proceedings are finished.

Brazil is a country with complicated bureaucracy and spastic enforcement. Unlike these guys, I had a proper multiple entry business visa, as I was going to Guyana for a related project before starting my fieldwork. Upon my return, the border guard slashed the expiry date on my visa by two months, to the day BEFORE my outgoing flight, just because he was cranky his soccer team was losing on the television. Had a similar cop asked why the guy named in our permits was 400 km away from the sample site, I would have been in an even worse situation than these folks. So please spare a thought for people caught in a system where, even if you do manage to navigate the Byzantine labyrinth of regulations, sadistically capricious enforcement can still screw you over.

Should reviewers phone a friend?

Role playing time, lemminglets. Suppose you are reviewing a paper. Also assume, that like most papers these days, that it has multiple authors, each of whom applies his expertise to the problem at had. And finally, assume that you are an expert in some, but not all of the fields used to solve the particular problem being reported in this paper.

What do you do if one of the key points in the paper that is not your area of expertise seems fishy. For example, if the paper is on your field area, what if some of the lab results seem fishy. Or if you are an analyst, what if the experimental setup seems odd.

Assuming that you are a successful researcher, you probably have long-time collaborators who are experts in these fields. So, what is the best way of accessing their expertise, given that some sort of confidence generally surrounds papers in review.

By ‘best’ I mean best for science, but if any of y’all want to interpret this as ‘best for me’ or ‘best for the editor’ or ‘best for the author’, that is fine too.

Arctic sea Ice pool: 4 weeks to go

With 4 weeks left to guess, the graph for the 2009 Arctic sea ice minimum gaussian guessing game is looking like this:


Contestants have solid, colored curves. The thick black/grey curves are the Ensemble 1 and 2 outputs from the Wegener Institute’s June 2009 Sea Ice outlook. The collective contestant’s pdf is the dotted light grey line (click to embiggen). It has grown from a bimodal distribution around the 2007 and 2008 minima, to a trimodal distribution with a third peak around 4000. Nick Barnes (4700 ± 200, pink) still needs to take another guess, if he so desires.

The current value (as of Friday) is 9,500 thousand km².

Happy Fourth of July

It's time to celebrate freedom from despotic tyrants, pyrotechnics, and BBQ. The first two aren't really big here in Australia, but the following suppliment to the third category makes up for all that.


BBQ sauce. Made from beer. What more could you want?

Naughty Geology

A few months back, I blogged about the client with a spam filter so tight that it embargoed emails about single young zircon dating. After conferring with said clients, it turns out that they’ve had other issues as well. In its animatronic zeal to rid the internet of pornography, this filter also blocks image files that it suspects are explicit. What sort of images? Well, anything containing a lot of pink, as it turns out. So, rose quartz, rhodocrosite, Mg-rich garnets, and other titillating mineral images have been known to disappear into the computer program’s private locker. Luckily they ship geologic maps as GIS files instead of images, or I’m sure they’d be targeted as well.

This got me thinking. How common are explicit geologic formations? You’d think that will all the zillions of folded, rounded, curved, or protruding structures on this planet, at least a few would be shaped like something that would constrict the coronary arteries of a shrill old censor. So, this is my challenge to the blogosphere: Find juiciest, most risqué geologic image that you feel comfortable posting, and put it out on the internet. Your traffic in tragically maladjusted lapidarians will expand tremendously, I guarantee.

Sadly, all I can offer in this department is this backscattered electron image of a rutile. To most people, it is simple igneous compositional zoning of Nb, Sn and W, which reflect electrons more efficiently than titanium and therefore appear bright. But to the dirty regolithic mind, this only needs legs, arms, and a head to become a swimsuit model. And no, I don’t need to leave the lab more often.


Figure 1. Detrital Phanerozoic rutile believed to be of pegmatitic origin See Birch et al. 2007 for geochronology and trace element characteristics.

Non-violent protest

As the 20th anniversary of the Chinese student crackdown comes and goes, my daughter has decided to celebrate by learning the methods of passive resistance and non-violent protest. The other day, Mrs. Lemming went out, and LLLL did not think that this was a fair or just activity by the leadership of the family. So, she staged a lie-in at the front door, complete with chanting and refusal to clear access to the front door. I suspect that the only reason she didn’t make a sign to wave is that she doesn’t know how to read or write. Her ability to render the message “My Mummy” in print will be limited until such a time as she learns the letter M. She does understand other visual statements, though. He shorts over jeans says only one thing: Until mummy comes back, I’m dressing even worse than dad.


Figure 1. LLLL organizing a lie-in behind the front door.