who only by moving can balance

• If you are a UK resident or citizen, please sign this petition calling on the gov't to let me self-define my gender rather than having to pay to have a Gender Recognition Panel (comprised, one assumes, entirely of cis people) decide whether I really mean it. (Ireland's just introduced decent legislation on this; several other countries around the world were there already.)
  
• Have a BBC article on "ghost trains", trains that run so infrequently as to be pretty much useless, and usually entirely empty.
  
• Jealous of what? Solving polyamory's jealousy problem. Still thinking about this one. Nice in principle (and roughly where I am in principle, in terms of connected networks rather than solo poly), but.
  
• Last First Snow stuff: meta at Tor, and some access-locked meta by forests_of_fire (link for my own reference etc etc). (20% of the way through this one, want to keep track of everything for when I'm done!)
  
• One of my mates' friends had, uh. uh. well. you know the hipster cop meme? ... have an life-imitating-art story about the origins of the hipster cop meme.
  
• Beautiful wood-based modern sculpture, vaguely steampunk aesthetic.
  
• cosmolinguist on space science and the funding thereof, linking on to an hour-long panic about having lost the photo of Pluto, yes, that photo of Pluto, feat:

  Parker feels pride, but knows that the image was a collective effort that began many years before the spacecraft’s 2006 launch, and one that will stretch beyond the solar system. “If you’re going to credit who made this image, you have to credit a thousand people,” Parker says. “I can’t say that it’s my image. None of us can. No one person can. We put the bow on it.”

Dear colleagues
I'm calling for information from the broad community about bad rock coring damage.

Many important sites are being devastated by this practice and it's bringing our science into disrepute. So I'm raising this as chair of the Geological Society of London's Geoconservation Committee - hopefully to guide approaches to reduce the problem. I know this is not just a UK problem .... There is however a spate of this going on in the NW Highlands at the moment. I also know there's been discussion on this list about bad rock sampling practice. So let's try to stamp this out together....

I'm sure many of you will be dismayed to see the attachment here of rock-coring damage to this famous outcrop of the sub-Torridonian unconformity adjacent to Loch Assynt, in NW Scotland. This location is visited by many hundreds students every year and is a key location in the NW Highlands Geopark. The local officers are dismayed about this. The outcrop is on land owned by the John Muir trust - a major conservation organisation (http://www.jmt.org/vision.asp).
Doing collecting like this is equivalent to stealing birds eggs or butterflies. Can you imagine archeologists being allowed to drill into the megaliths of Stonehenge etc? It's a question of ethics and must stop. Geologists in general risk being viewed as having no regard for their environment. So our various conservation and public awareness campaigns and initiatives may become less well-regarded or ignored.

Other sites in NW Scotland that have been attacked in this way include designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest that are protected by law - so such coring is a criminal act. Pleading ignorance is no defence! They include a lot of the classic outcrops of Durness limestone around Durness itself and eastern Eriboll and the Scourie dykes at Scourie More. Not to mention virtually every one of the dykes forming part of the Tertiary swarm at Elgol on Skye.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not against rock coring itself - but it can be done better - such by excavating parts of outcrops then recovering them. Even then the holes should be refilled - and ideally finished off with the outcrop face off-cut of the core all bonded with a resilient, weather-proof cement - to leave the least visible trace of the activity. Going after the best, most visited and previously photogenic sites is reprehensible. There are plenty of good-practice guides around that could be consulted... and applied (e.g. www.geologistsassociation.org.uk/downloads/GARockCoringGuide.pdf).

So - what to do? Too often we discuss and report these as individual incidents. It's time to gather information more widely. Of course it's not just members of the tectonics community who are responsible - and so please pass on this request for information to colleagues.
And send me images (really not at not too large a file size: to [e-mail address]) - with some location specifics. If you can tie these examples of damage to specific publications that have arisen from them - then you might like to send me the link to the paper too. Although I'm specifically interested in auditing the extent of the problem through the UK - - please also share examples from elsewhere in the world.
Once we know what's going on, then we can work out better strategies to educate those who do this kind of thing - and promote better practice.

Many thanks

Rob

dw_dev_training

• IRC! I spend lots of time hanging out in dreamwidth IRC. That counts, right? ;)
  
• Research. Of the Forming Opinions On Mass Extinctions variety, and similar.
  
• VaginaPagina. (What? It's not all on DW, it totally counts.)
  
• Ravelry, increasingly, these days.
  
• BPAL.org forums, ditto.
  
• Writing fic! Researching fic! Reading fic! Mostly at AO3 these days, for all its faults.
  
• Cooking blogs! Only since I added the Smitten Kitchen feed I am mostly only checking Pioneer Woman Cooks irregularly off-DW, and, erm, that manages to regularly annoy me with its tee-hee-aren't-we-naughty attitude to calories.
  
• ... recently, trawling the depths of eBay and Etsy and sharing the results, to collective horror and delight.
  
• ... probably more, but do you know what, it's 4am and I've just had a fabulous evening involving fabulous live music PERFORMED IN PART BY MY FABULOUS FRIENDS <333 and I am slightly drunk and have just contributed time to DW and NOW via PACKING I shall go to BED and SLEEP and it will be GREAT.