Category Archives: Digressions

Beringer’s Lying Stones; fraud and absurdity in science

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A tale of scientific fraud and personal hubris

My second-year university Geology wasn’t particularly notable except for a bit of academic trickery. A group of us near-do-well students created a fictitious student and added his name to exam lists, penning grades that were middle of the road, to avoid catching the attention of academic staff. The charade ended when a lecturer asked to meet this person. Our creation quietly disappeared, having, in the interim, amused us and annoyed a few teachers; but no crime had been committed, no careers jeopardised. Continue reading

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Stabilisation of an architectural icon; the Leaning Tower of Pisa

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Sunday in Pisa proved to be a welcome change from the usual tourist-cramped, shoulder-barging throngs of popular attractions in Tuscany.  No problem finding a seat in a decent café, en route to the Piazza del Miricoli.  Cross the street, turn a corner and there – the massive, white-marbled Pisa Duomo, Romanesque grandeur with a veneer of 21st Century scaffolding.  But the sense of balance normally attributed to cathedrals, is disrupted by the stand-alone bell tower that leans precariously, like a drunk looking for a lamppost.  The Leaning Tower of Pisa has been looking for a lamp-post for almost one thousand years.  And for a thousand years, people have been drawn to the tower not because it is particularly beautiful, but because it looks like it is about to fall over. Continue reading

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A measure of the universe; Renaissance slide-rules and Heavenly spheres

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Measurement is a cornerstone of science, in fact of pretty well everything we do: How far? How fast? How long?  We take most measurement for granted, with little thought to how the process originated.  We demand accuracy and precision, forgetting that these are relatively modern luxuries.  Before the universal clock chimed GMT in 1884, there were more than 200 time zones in the US.  A league in France was shorter than a league in Spain, a discrepancy for which the 16th C French scribe François Rabelais had an imaginative, if rollicking explanation.  In his tale, The Life of Gargantua and Pantegruel (1532-1564), a king required a standard distance to be determined (after all, if he was going to send his armies to battle it would be best if his advisors new how far they had to go).  He sent a trusted Knight, instructing him to ride to Spain, stopping every league to “roger and swive”; hence the discrepancy.  The leagues gradually became longer. The amusing satire of this explanation had its roots in real Medieval measures; the width of a hand, the distance one could walk in an hour. Continue reading

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Galileo’s finger

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“Their final resting place…” a sepulchral phrase, redolent of a fate that awaits us all.  There is no doubt as to its finality, but resting…?  A nice metaphor that may convey a sense of comfort to the living, rather than the deceased.  Wander through any church or cathedral in Europe and Britain, and you will inevitably walk over cold marble slabs, engraved with the details of those who lie beneath, polished by the feet of a myriad worshipers and tourists.  The Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence is, in many respects, like any other magnificent church; it is old, construction beginning in 1295, with alterations and additions during the 14th -15th century overlapping the earlier Gothic forms.  The Basilica is stunning, but differs from many of its contemporaries in that it became THE place in Italy to be buried. Continue reading

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The life of a Tuscan wall

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The Medieval village of Montefioralle, Tuscany

Montefioralle, Chianti country, Tuscany, Italy, and from where I’m sitting (happily sampling a Chianti Classico) I see rolling, wooded hills, next season’s vintage, olive groves, a scattering of farm dwellings, and rock walls. Quintessential Tuscany. Except for a few ratty road cuts, there is little native rock exposed in this part of Tuscany from which a keen geologist might ascertain something of ancient pre-Tuscan history (farther south this changes).  But in fact, there are rocks aplenty. Most walls (houses, defensive, retaining, decorative) are made of limestone and sandstone, some quarried and deliberately shaped, as in churches and castello (that date back to the 10th -11th century), and others that made use of whatever was handy at the time. Most of these materials were collected locally; stones that littered the hillsides, and stones brought to the surface during ploughing.  Even today, ploughs bring stones to the surface; the local clay-loam soils are incredibly stony (an important part of Chianti terroir).

So, despite the paucity of hard-rock exposure, one can make a reasonable guess at the geology beneath the hills and vineyards, based on the stone composition in local buildings. About 50-60% of the stones are cream-coloured marls; marl is an old name (medieval Latin) given to very fine grained, usually muddy limestone that breaks along curved, sharp-edged surfaces (referred to as conchoidal  breakage).  The Tuscan marls are very hard – ideal for building stone.  Variations on this theme include sandy limestones, some of which contain intricate contorted layering, and small crossbeds that indicate flowing water many millions of years ago.

Sedimentary structures in buidling stone of a Tuscan wall

Grey sandstone is also common; in fact it is found as paving stone throughout most of Tuscany.  All kinds of structures are visible in these stones, especially cut stones in larger buildings and roads; fossil ripples that indicate flowing water, trails and burrows of critters that moved across or below the ancient seafloor in search of food or finding a place to live. Some of the sandstones are not as hard as the marls, and in places show quite advanced damage where bits of rock fritter away with the vagaries of weather.

An assortment of red bricks, some rumoured to be of Roman or Etruscan derivation, has been used in most walls. It looks like odd-shaped bricks are filling equally odd-shaped gaps, but they have also been used to replace stone arches over doors, or fill holes in walls left by marauding armies (of which there were many), or neglect.

sandstone, marl, limestone in every building, wall and walkway

The rocks were originally deposited as sediment in an ancient and vast ocean called Tethys, that separated two supercontinents – Gondwana, and Laurasia (most of Europe and Asia).  The Tethys was closed when, about 65 million years ago, the African plate (part of Gondwana) drifted north and crunched into Laurasia. The resulting uplift produced the Apennine Ranges that now course the length of Italy.

Montefioralle is a picturesque hill-top village, typical of many in Tuscany.  Its medieval origins are still visible, but frequent battles between neighbouring villages, as well as larger fracas between Florence and Siena, put a few dents in the outer wall and houses. The hill top is crowned by a small church and tower; the last refuge in the event of siege.  There is clear evidence of repairs made over the last 800 plus years, including, I suspect, some from a more recent European conflict.

Stones in these Tuscan walls weave their tales in different threads. The limestones and sandstones have a geological story that spans 10s of millions of years, the disappearance of an ocean and the collision of continents.  Each stone and brick can also relate centuries of local history; each was carefully placed by someone, a stone-mason or perhaps a Renaissance DIY. Nameless, we can admire their handy-work, wonder what they talked about with their fellow workers, what they ate, who they loved.  There are centuries of these former lives everywhere in Tuscany. Chianti Classico loosens all their tongues.

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A very British Library

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Book stratigraphy

Being acquainted with things that are really ancient, is an everyday experience for a geologist; fossils and other flotsam of lives past, meteorites as old as the solar system itself. Records of these ancient lives, their successes and failures, of catastrophes, of ancient worlds, are written in every chip of rock, every grain of sand. We marvel at these stories, at their old-ness. My recent visit to the British Library in London was a reminder that our written history is also ancient, but counted in millennia rather than eons.  I’m talking books and parchment, not carved cuneiform tablets. These treasures are housed in a room of the same name, light and humidity controlled, protected from hands that would love to turn the pages. Sensible precautions of course; many of these pieces would probably disintegrate at the slightest touch.  I’d never seen the sole-surviving copy of Beowulf, an original Gutenberg or King James Bible, the Magna Carta, a 3rd Century fragment of a Gospel, a Thomas Tallis liturgical composition. So many documents that record our history and inform our present. Continue reading

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A Watery Mars; Canals, a duped radio audience, and geological excursions

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Map of Martian canals by Schiaparelli in 1888

Title page to H.G.Wells iconic book, 1927Deceptive news is the art of pulling wool over the eyes of the populace, a tool (recently resurrected by certain politicians) for persuasion or dissuasion.  Orson Welles got more than he bargained for when, on October 30, 1938, he orchestrated a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells The War of The Worlds, a 1898 sci-fi that pits intelligent Martians against Victorian Britain.  Welles broadcast created a mix of amusement in some commentators, and in others panic and anger; panic in the unwitting, anger in the duped (especially other broadcasters), and amusement in all the above.

Well’s novel, apart from being the product of an agile mind, was influenced by some of the popular astronomical ideas of his time.  Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli produced, in 1888 a wonderfully detailed map of Mars showing (above image), among features such as seas, islands, and other landmasses, a network of ‘canali’, or channels.  Canali was misinterpreted in English as canals, and along with all its connotations of intelligent life, the idea of Martian canals entered popular belief. Continue reading

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Terroir-as

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Thinking about TerroirAmong wine drinkers, the term Terroir can invoke glazed expressions, or in real enthusiasts an opportunity to wax lyrical about the provenance of their beverage.  The term is French, morphing from the word terre , the land, or earth.  It conveys a ‘sense of place’, the earth, the climate, and the culture of wine-making.  In other words, pretty well anything that contributes to a wine’s character.

Opinions vary about the real significance of terroir. For some, the cultural foundations are most important in a kind of philosophical, metaphysical way.  For others, it is the physical environment in which the grapes grow, are harvested, and finally turned into wine.  For the more cynical it is just a marketing ploy, something to make the purchaser and imbiber feel good.  The French have honed this to a fine art, to the point where only wine from Burgundy can be called Burgundy, or Champagne from a region and appellation of the same name in north France. Continue reading

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A Gaggle of Goose Barnacles

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A gaggle of Goose Barnacles (Lepas anatifera), west coast New Zealand, near Raglan.  The inset emphasizes the shelly plates of individuals and their long 
fleshy stalks

A gaggle of Goose Barnacles (Lepas anatifera), west coast New Zealand, near Raglan. The inset emphasizes the shelly plates of individuals and their long fleshy stalks

You never know what new treasures will be discovered strolling along a beach after a good storm.  The beach may have changed shape; cusps, ruts and rills smoothed, some of the sand moved offshore beneath the waves, a few sand dunes cut in half.  There’s flotsam and jetsam, a few bedraggled seabirds.  And there are shells, mostly devoid of their original inhabitants.

Raglan (west coast New Zealand – i.e. the coast facing Tasman Sea) was a bit like that this week.  One particularly neat find on our jaunt was a largish log completely covered in Goose Barnacles.  It is usually the case that critters like these are dead by the time they wash up the beach.  But this time all were still alive.  The log was a slowly-seething mass of stalked shells, parched, and all looking for a way out of their predicament.

Goose barnacles, other than being fascinating to watch up close, have served the science of evolution.  Charles Darwin’s book about them, published in 1851, contains many of the ideas he was formulating about species variations and embryonic development, laying some of the foundations for his ‘Origin of Species’.

 

Lepas anatifera

Yes, that’s its zoological name.  The common name ‘Goose barnacle’ has an interesting history that from a 21stC perspective seems slightly weird.  The word derives from a 13th century usage for a seabird – the so-called Barnacle Goose, an Arctic migrant.  Gaggles breed in the Arctic then migrate to spend a balmy winter on British shores.  Coastal Brits, those that hadn’t been press-ganged into the Crusades, were never quite sure where the birds came from (they never saw the eggs).  They surmised that the actual stalked barnacle looked a bit like the actual bird, and that the birds hatched in much the same way, from the planks of ships, whereupon they would fly off to join their gaggle.

Lepas attaches with a long fleshy stalk (a peduncle) to flotsam, logs, basically anything that floats; the Raglan examples were up to 20cm long.  The stalk is part of the animal that can move the shell to take advantage of currents, light, or food.  The animals live cheek-by-jowl, as you can see in the image.  They are crustaceans like crabs and shrimp.

Barnacle guts are contained within five shelly plates.   They feed by filtering microscopic particles, plankton, and algae from seawater using delicate, feathery protrusions called cirri (hence the general classification as Cirripedes).  In the video, our Raglan examples are extending their cirri in air – perhaps they can sense the incoming tide.

Darwin’s barnacles; sources of invention

He wrote four books on these critters; two on living groups (the stalked group and the sessile-attached group), and two volumes on fossil representatives.  The first was on the stalked variety, including Lepas. A second volume on (living) barnacles that are more commonly cemented to rocks was published in 1854. His studies of these creatures provided him with insights into species variation and embryonic development.  As Martin Rudwick illustrates in his wonderful book ‘The Meaning of Fossils; Episodes in the History of Palaeontology, Darwin understood that both phenomenon would require cogent explanation to convince his audience of the central theme of his ‘Origins’; natural selection.   Thus, his studious and systematic observations of barnacles, seemingly a dry topic, provided both the data and the wherewithal for creative thinking.

Diagram of goose barnacles from Darwin's monograph 1851.

 

Prevailing 19th century thought on species development, postulated by pioneer biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), was that species tended to progress toward improvement and complexity.  Darwin’s recognized that regression was also an important adaptive process in evolution.  He based this challenge to the status quo on the well-known fact that free-swimming barnacle larvae have legs (like other crustaceans), and that these appendages are converted “into an intricate food-collecting device, and lost many of the functions and organs associated with a free-swimming life.” (Martin Rudwick, p233).  This feeding device is the cirri.

As is so often the case in science, the seemingly innocuous, tedious, but deliberate gathering of data can lead to startling invention and discovery. The humble Goose Barnacle has certainly done its part in shaping our ideas on the biological world. With our barnacle-covered log, we were witness to a microcosm struggling for survival; hundreds of individuals and a single community. Some days later, most are dead, scavenged by seagulls and demolished by waves. Perhaps all that’s left are a few broken, disarticulated shells.

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Martin J.S. RudwickThe Meaning of Fossils; Episodes in the History of Palaeontology. Second Edition, 1976, Science History Publications, Neale Watson Academic Publications Inc, New York.

There is a nice essay by Marsha Richmond (2007) on Darwin’s barnacles, written for Darwin on Line.

You can also find lots of interesting general information and teaching resources on Darwin, including his voluminous correspondence (more than 2000 letters), on Cambridge University’s Darwin Correspondence Project

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Science vs. Anti-science; Editorial in Scientific American

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If you haven’t already done so, have a read of this Editorial from Scientific American.  It concerns the state of science and anti-science in American politics in general, and the current election campaign in particular.  And before you write this off as the meanderings of a bunch of elite, leftist twits, consider that Scientific American has been publishing since 1845, and has been at the forefront of patenting and technology advancement for over 170 years. Sci Am has an enviable reputation for espousing scientific values, scientific thinking, and the kind of creativity that gives rise to discoveries that help improve humanity’s lot.

Scientific journals like Scientific American rarely if ever contribute comments to political debates unless they are responding to specific scientific or technological questions or issues.  So for Sci Am to comment in this manner is unusual to say the least.  I encourage people to read and think about the issues stated here for two primary reasons:

1. That it cuts to the core of science and the integrity of science (industry in the broadest sense would simply not exist without science and technology); and

2. This issue is not just the purview of American politics (in the most general terms) but concerns politics in many other nations, my own countries (New Zealand and Canada) included, where evidence-based policy, debate, and argument is increasingly taking a back seat to the shallowness of popularity and superficial comment.

The issue(s) stated in the Editorial go beyond party politics.  There are many scientific issues that require reasoned debate and comment – issues around medical, environmental and genetic engineering science, to name just three, that impact not just the way science is conducted, but the way we think about human values, ethics, and beliefs. Scientific knowledge is crucial.

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