Mistakes

I feel kind of sad to discover that the myth that Persian rug makers put deliberate mistakes into their rugs to show respect to Allah is just that, a myth. I liked the idea that skilled artisans that probably didn't knowingly make mistakes in their craft felt the need to muddy the potential perfection of their craft by introducing a mistake. In our mind's eye, anything we make will be perfect. Reality just get's in the way.
    Some people would argue that the 'deliberate mistake' is something of an arrogance. Make a deliberate mistake because an accidental one couldn't possibly happen. I instead like to think of the 'deliberate mistake' as a kind of prayer. A stitch knitted when it should have been purled, the wrong coloured thread on a tapestry. That action feels like an acknowledgement to God that the skills, talents if you like to draw that parable parallel, are God-given. To the person who later finds the mistake perhaps they too will think on the devotion of the maker of the item and perhaps their own spirituality.

    OK, I now feel inclined to link this in with science.
A true scientist of the scientific method must admit mistakes. If they collect data that contradicts their hypothesis they must admit that this is what they find. There should be no shame also in admitting they made an error in an experiment. Something broke, someone read a figure out wrong. To quote The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy book 4 So long and thanks for all the fish by Douglas Adams:

"But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.”  - Wonko the Sane

While looking for that exact quote I also found this one by Jules Verne from Journey to the Centre of the Earth:

“Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” 

Too much science it seems, especially in geology these days, is firmly set in dogma. People don't admit they are wrong after being shown evidence to the contrary. Data is manipulated. Lines are drawn in the sand. 

The deliberate mistake is not searched for. The null hypothesis isn't sort.

When I was at high school we were taught to calculate errors in every possible way. The errors of the ruler, the container, how much liquid was lost in transference, how actuate the mass balance was.

There's no such thing as a 5 sigma error test in geology like there is in physics. More shame on us.

Why we need sci-fi: An amble on the topic.

Thinking about the formative books of my late teenage years several of them were science or speculative fiction. Ben Elton's Blind Faith, Orwell's classic 1984 and Ray Bradbury's off-kilter, chilling vision of parlour walls and firemen Fahrenheit 451 shaped my view of the world a lot. They also scared the living daylights out of me.

Strangely I believe that sci-fi manages to frequently go to darker places than any other genre. The horror of a spin-chiller is solely contained within the pages of the book. Although a few nightmares of monsters and murders may follow those terrors are primarily cathartic. We observe horror in film or read it in books, it maybe part of humanity we find distasteful or bestial, we can then examine it within the story and by the end we feel a release, a purging of the emotions associated with secret shames or untold fears. Not being a fan of scares like that I can only comment on other commentary I've heard on the matter (video game commentary actually of the likes of Silent Hill 2) but I think that is the basic psychology behind horror.
Science fiction does not offer that catharsis, if anything the reader is left with a sense of unease at what they have read.

Before I continue I should say that yes, not all science fiction does this. Space Westerns like Star Wars, Star Trek and Firefly or serials like Doctor Who are a little more light-hearted and fanciful but even they manage social commentary in a futuristic or alternative technology setting. (No I will not go into whether Star Wars is true sci-fi right now. However, I will say that some of the more recent novels have certainly elevated the series with more social commentary than usual including elements such as what a Sith meritocracy looks like and whether the Dark Side is grounds enough to plea diminished responsibility to a murder).

Science fiction has often been viewed as the purview of the nerd, geek and cult follower. Things like The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy are often referred to as 'Cult Classics'. Most people will admit they have one favoured romance book, action flick, historical television show et cetera but science fiction  may be dismissed in its entirety. Which is a shame because sci-fi is not just robots, mad scientists and aliens. In fact in what you would call 'hard' sci-fi these things might be present but not the focus. They are narrative devices. Sci-fi is probably one of the most 'message' heavy genres out there because a lot of it is allegory.

1984: Fears of communism
District 9: Apatite South Africa
Do androids dream of electric sheep?/Blade Runner: What makes a person human?
X-men: Social issues of race and sexuality oppression and phobia.
Ghost in the Shell: The internet as the new primeval pools of life and trans-humanism
Ender's Game: Are all things fair in (love and) war?
And that shouldn't be seen as a bad thing, far from it. Allegory is a way into thinking about issues by introducing them through a narrative.

Today I read in a newspaper (code name: The Tea-leaf-graph) that three Shakespeare plays now have to be taught as part of English before GCSE. Setting aside for a moment the limited selection of appropriate plays that one can teach to a 12 year old (is this a dagger I see before me?/A rose by any other name/ If he was in my books I would burn my study maybe?) I fear this is removing space for other genres to be taught.

(My next point requires a bit of set up, bare with me). Now I went through reading Lord of the Flies kicking and screaming (seriously, what is with that pig's head?!) and the less said about Cold Mountain the better, but Regeneration by Pat Barker was a revelation for me (yes I did actually do A Level English, non, je ne regrette rien). I was introduced to a kind of fiction I never thought I would enjoy. For those unfamiliar, Regeneration is a World War I semi-biographic work about Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen during their time at Craiglockhart Mental Hospital. For me, the book was a way into Sassoon and Owen's real poetry and prose as well as giving me a better feel for life for the mentally ill at the time. It also taught me that just because a book might not sound my cup of tea doesn't mean a darn thing!

I really hope that perhaps a classic piece of sci-fi will make it's way into the English curriculum alongside the compulsory Shakespeare and give some young people the opportunity to discover a book, and genre, they probably never thought they'd like.

DVD extras:

Books I would suggest as one's to be taught in schools (with approximate age ratings):

1984 by George Orwell. 16 years and up for the best level of appreciation.
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. 14 and up (younger if the children are fairly mature).
Star Wars: Truce at Bakura Kathy Tyers. (11 and up) Don't laugh! Everyone's seen Star Wars and this follows on directly for Return of the Jedi. It has some interesting ideas about the human soul and mind control.
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. (13 and up, or basically over an age where a child can hear the word 'sex' without giggling uncontrollably).
Anything by H.G. Wells or Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov. (I wouldn't include my favourite non-Douglas-Adams sci-fi author in this list though, because Philip. K. Dick is a bit.... odd).

Scotty, beam me up!

Broadband seismometers meme

Yeah, this is one of mine... Yes, I know it's bad...

To make up for it, here's the 8th funniest joke from the Edinburgh Fringe 2013 by Liam Williams:

The Universe implodes. No matter.

Hi ho Silver, away!

Ah, the Lone Ranger.... or as Jasper Carrot once pointed out, the Lone Ranger... and Tonto. (Yes my last post was a bit heavy, so time to lighten the mood)
Despite warnings to the contrary by American critics I went and saw the new 'Lone Ranger' film anyway. And despite its narrative short comings (which is the main issue) it sort of played out like a live action cartoon complete with implausible survival from ridiculous injuries and a quasi-supernatural horse. The plot about maybe-maybe-not-cursed silver was silly but at least I wasn't bored at any particular point which is at least a point in its favor.
    But I'm not here to review the film more use it as a jumping off point to talk about precious metals and silver in particular.

Gold, Silver, Platinum and the more exotic Palladium and Rhodium very much call to mind a certain romance. Throughout human history where ever precious metals have been located humans have coveted it. It's quite easy to tell if an element was known about by an ancient people because it usually don't have an '-ium' on the end of the name. Copper, lead, zinc, tin, sulphur, iron et cetera as well as gold and silver have been known about for a good number of years either because the element was found in a native, pure, form (like silver) or was easily liberated from an ore. Silver is found, often, with native copper although several ores exist.

So here's a few quick (fairly) interesting facts about silver (no not the horse):

1. Many silver compounds, including silver nitrate, are used in photography development.

2. Mirrors were often made by 'silvering' glass. During 19th century silvering was produced by the direct coating of silver onto the glass surface. The process is quite simple, requiring a few chemicals that will cause the precipitation of silver onto roughed glass (to provide a surface of deposition).

3. High quality wind instruments will often have solid silver mouth pieces or whole bodies for superior sound quality.

4. Silver has anti-bacterial properties. You might have noticed silver plasters for cuts in pharmacies.

5. Sterling silver bares the hallmark '925'. Pure silver is marked as 999. Since this is a total out of 1000 (the millesimal system), sterling silver is therefore 92.5% pure silver with the remaining 7.5% often made up with copper. Silver is alloyed like this to improve silver's relatively soft nature.

6. Silver bullets are quite popular in fiction. In myth a werewolf can only be killed using silver bullets. The Lone Ranger also carried silver bullets to symbolize how valuable a life is.

And we're back around to the Lone Ranger again,

Hi, ho, Silver, away! 

An open letter to the 'frack off' community

Dear Frack-Offers,
                            I'm going to assume that the majority of you do not live in a cave or wooden hut, wear hemp and wool only and use candles (beeswax not paraffin) for lighting. I'm going to assume you own a phone, probably traveled to your protest site by a means of transport that wasn't walking or bareback horse riding and have drunk out of a plastic bottle at some point.

    We live in the Oil Age, just as our ancestors lived in the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. Almost every part of our modern lives is fueled in some way by oil. It is unfortunate but many of the wonderful things about life today, plastics, medicine, the internal combustion engine require drilling for oil. And yes, it is a finite resource. But tell me, if we do not drill for oil in this country, under some of the strictest laws and regulations on the planet, where would you like to get your oil from?
    Your answer would probably be either, 'nowhere' or 'not here'. Neither of those are particularly selfless recommendations. Until we perfect cold fusion or whatever is the next big breakthrough in energy we need oil. Yes, we should recycle, lower our energy usage and really think about whether driving to work and school is necessary but we will still need oil even if that is the case. Just less of it. (If, by the way, you are part of the NIMBY lot, I've nothing to say to you except people in Saudi Arabia probably don't like having whacking great oil refineries all over their landscape).

    Now to the crux of my letter, so I hope you're sitting comfortably,
I am a geologist. I have study geology formally for five year of my life and have held a keen interest in it for probably nearly 15 years. I don't say this so I can pretend I am qualified to pass judgment on the situation. No, I tell you this to prove I am a scientist and apply logic, knowledge and the scientific method to things and that my knowledge is mainly based in geology.
    Here's a home truth: Fracking causing earthquakes because any breaking of a rock below ground produces thermal and seismic energy which we would call an 'earthquake'. But, do you know how big an earthquake has to be to actually be felt by a human? 2 on the Local Magnitude (Richter) Scale. Do you know what size most fracking earthquakes are? In the negative numbers, -2, -1 etc. Richter, who made the Local Magnitude scale thought that any earthquake less than 1 (a size only rarely felt by humans) would be so insignificant as to not be relevant.

    Now, the larger quake in Blackpool I can't pass much comment on as I've not read any literature on the causes of the quake or what people think happen but that kind of event is not likely and not supposed to be a regular event when fracking happens. Besides, the UK government is currently enforcing a policy of no fracking. I mean, what more do you want? As old and as fractured as Britain is, it is also extremely well mapped, geologically. A company knows what they are drilling into and, wait for it, will always mitigate risks to the environment, people and their workers because they are legally obligated to do so, and also for the sake of any future contracts they may wish to acquire.
     Cuadrilla is not fracking at the site you are protesting. They are drilling an exploration well for oil and even admit the site might not go into full scale production at all. Also, and this may have escaped your notice, the company does not possess a licence to frack at the site.

Please, go home. Leave Cuadrilla alone. Groups like the RSPB who have real concerns about drilling occurring within protected sites I sympathize with. After all, once a nature reserve has an oil well developed on it, there isn't a nature reserve there any more. And yes, mechanisms must be put in place to protect against contamination of ground water. But the type of individual who is prepared to brake into private property and use bully tactics through volume of numbers to get what they want, regardless of the cause, I do not sympathize with. I'm sorry.

Might I suggest you take a holiday to Dorset and visit the coast around Wytch farm instead?

Yours,

LostTimeLady, geologist

Here is the permits that Cuadrilla has for the site at Balcombe, East Sussex:  http://www.cuadrillaresources.com/our-sites/balcombe/

The chock cycle

My high school geology/geography/RE teacher (she taught a lot of subjects over the years, it was a small school with a lot of teacher overlap) used to do fun things with us in geology class including what she liked to call edible geology. This involved taking a geological concept and explaining it with food.

This one wasn't one of her ideas per se but does slightly borrow from her idea of how Mars bars are a good analogy for folding.

Also, before continuing know that I've made this for a bit of fun and any student of geology who happens across this should know that that is the case and bare that in mind!

OK, so first of the ground rules so to speak, how rocks and chocolate are similar:

Both can melt.
Both can be fractured or mechanically weathered.
Both have variable composition.
Both can be found in different forms.
Both have variations in colour and texture.
Both have a variable viscosity as they cool and solidify.
Both can be combined with other chocolate/rocks to form new rocks of variable composition. i.e. Magma mixing or those nice sea shell chocolates with the praline in the middle.

How chocolate and rocks aren't similar:
There's only a handful of rocks on the planet that make their way into foodstuffs. The main one is salt.

OK, so this is the rock cycle:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Rock_cycle.gif

So now with the ground work done let's think about the rock cycle:

Imagine your block of nice solid chocolate. What are the things you can do to it? (Apart from eat it!)

Well, you can grate it. This would be like mechanical weathering of a rock leading to particles that can be transported.

This grated material can be transported then compressed with minimum heat and temperature to form a new, if crumbly, slab or be set inside some kind of matrix, like on top of the icing on a cake. This represents a sedimentary rock.

Next you could deform the chocolate. Apply enough heat to cause folding but not for it to melt. This represents low grade metamorphism. If this happened to a rock it would still be identified as the original rock. If you really bent and squished the chocolate beyond all recognition this could be seen as higher grade metamorphism. Throw in some raisins and hazelnuts and you've got some fruit 'n' nut metamorphosed chocolate with porphyroblasts.

Finally, you can melt the chocolate. This would be your magma stage of a rock. In reality rocks don't so much melt due to a temperature rise than a fall in pressure causing melting. Think about it this way, you can boil water on top of Everest at 30 degrees because the pressure is much lower. The atmosphere is thinner. As mantle rock rises the temperature will remain within the rock because it's a poor conductor of heat but the pressure drop leads to melting.

But since this is the rock cycle there are many different ways all this can happen so I've made a handy chocolate diagram:

Now here's another thing about chocolate, it's called tempering.

Nice shiny chocolate with a crisp 'snap' is caused by the alignment of the fat molecules in the slab. If you melt the chocolate beyond a certain temperature the chocolate is no longer in 'temper' that is when it resets it will not set to a crisp shine and instead it will melt at room temperature! (Depending on your type of chocolate temper is about 40 degrees C, approximately). If you melt an igneous rock and cool it again the the same way you will get the same rock. But, if you cool it down differently you'll end up with a different grain size and rock texture. This is the reverse of the chocolate since it's the heating not the cooling that effects chocolate.

OK, so in the end not the most perfect analogy for the rock cycle but still fun to think about.

TTFN. 

Fun geology fact: A trilobite fossil is named after Harrison Ford's character from Star Wars, the fossil is called H. Solo. 

Non-Newtonian YouTube video playlist

I love Non-Newtonian fluids!
From the first time I saw the cornflour and water experiment to now, when my Masters project will focus on particle suspensions causing Non-Newtonian behavior in fluids I've been captivated.

Here's a playlist of some good videos on YouTube about it. It mainly focuses on shear-thickening behaviors but it's a good representation of how odd liquids can behave:

This is Veritasium's take on the cornflour/water mix on a speaker video and had a great analogy for shear-thickening by describing it like traffic in LA.

A three way comparison of water, silly putty and cornflour/water: http://youtu.be/bLiNHqwgWaQ 

Hank Green's Sci Show video on Non-Newtonian fluid

Some slow motion footage of impacts on cornflour/water mixtures.

Some more home economics level cornflour/water experiments.