Prof Col Macpherson

You should be charged

Coincidentally I am at a university (not college) function at Hatfield tomorrow evening. If current Principal (Ann MacLarnon) is there I will ask if they have a copy in the college library ... and if not why not 😂

Web page search result from Durham University Library catalogue search. Return for "How late it was, how late" by James Kelman, indicated as Available Online.

If it's any consolation: Live from the @dulib.bsky.social search facility ...

Personally, I'm still coming to terms with it being a magic number.

🤘⚒️

Well that is just … so bloody Scotland 🤦‍♂️

Sumatra is probably best studied for this. Not just the Boxing Day quake but more generally too. Not my direct field so don’t have specific citations. Bug that would be good place to look I think.

But it spawned one of the greatest rock albums of all time. Smoke on the Water is the best known song yet, for me, barely scrapes top five (of the seven tracks) on Machine Head.

Wishing I'd listened to more Handel, Pachelbel, and JS Bach this year so my Spotify listening age would have been about 300.

Stories in Stone: Aboriginal Oral Traditions of Volcanic Impacts in Northeastern Australia - Geoheritage Throughout Australia, oral traditions exist that encode memories of catastrophic and impactful events and landscape changes such as floods, meteor impacts and volcanic eruptions. In pre-colonization t...

Incredible work here tracing continuous oral traditions among Aboriginal peoples over a near-geological timescale.

The article argues oral traditions transmitted information about volcano eruptions from 9,000 years ago:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

LEFT: Plane polarised view of a large phlogopite crystal showing strong cleavage planes running SW to NE. Zoned crystal is colourless in centre and fox brown on rim. Surrounded by interlocking grains of calcite. RIGHT: Same field of view in cross polarised light. Zoning in phlogopite shown by green colour in centre and magenta edge. Calcite groundmass shows well defined twin planes as alternating bands of (relatively) low interference colours and extinction.

Christmas zoned phlogopite in carbonatite for #ThinSectionThursday. In PPL (left) Mg-rich core shows less colour than brown rim (pleochroic to colourless) which has higher Fe, possibly due to Al-deficiency. Same chemical variation gives different interference colours in XPL (right) 🧪⚒️🌋🎄🎅

Breaking the system ... nothing more punk than that!

As a sports lover whose PhD research involved refining a process using chlorine trifluoride, I am comfortable with this analogy. 🧪

Your top (music) genres (from Spotify): 1 Punk. 2 Progressive Rock. 3 Art Rock. 4 Indie Rock. 5 Two-tone.

Yup. Sounds about right. Or right about sounds. 🎸🤘🎵

Yeah ... ooohhhhhh yeah!!

Linking crystal shape and dynamic undercooling: a new framework for inferring magmatic crystallization histories - Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology Magmas contain crystals exhibiting diverse shapes and sizes, yet the relationship between crystal shape (specifically aspect ratio) and undercooling ( $$\Delta T$$ ), the driving force for crystalliza...

Check out this new Open Access article written by researchers from the Earth Sciences Department and collaborators!
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

chart of child mortality in history, roughly 48% for all societies across the globe…until the 20th century, where it plummets to 4%

Currently dorking out over this graph about child mortality with my brother. Just mind boggling to take in.

Why is Rafa Nadal in the back row, fourth from left?

I’ve included von Laue in a lecture on XRD for years but only learned this recently. It’s a brilliant story.

Dissolve My Nobel Prize! Fast! (A True Story) It's 1940. The Nazis have taken Copenhagen, and physicist Niels Bohr has just hours, maybe minutes, to make two Nobel Prize medals disappear.

How do you hide two Nobel Prize medals from invading Nazis? Dissolve them in acid of course (and reprecipitate them later). This is applied chemistry at its finest 🧪
www.npr.org/sections/kru...

Hampden Park would like a word.

"Bring plate tectonics please" ⚒️🧪

Been sprouts

Ashfall Fossil Beds is an astonishing locality of which I was ignorant until last week. Included it in Monday’s Introduction to Volcanoes lecture to @durhamearthsci.bsky.social first years. 🧪🌋⚒️

Blackford Hill?

YouTube video by The Stranglers - Topic Walk on By

Greatest cover ever. The Stranglers at 131bpm compared to Dionne Warwick's 99bpm original. Always that they captured what the protagonist was feeling while Warwick projected what the protagonist wants the world to see.
youtu.be/WYkqLm9cM3Y

Missile preservation has no business being this productive. Apparently WD40 was invented to protect missile housings (WD standing for water deterrent). 🧪🚀

I find this on shorter timescales too. I can work on practicing a new (bass) part and feel like I'm all thumbs and will never figure it. Leave it for two, three days ... a week. Then play it fine first time thorough.

Members of band Spinal Tap getting lost looking for way to stage.

My brain on tour ...

… and there is some fabulous anthropogenic sedimentation on the beaches used in Get Carter. ⚒️🧪