Noah's Flood: a no-no

Another sample from the now 130-strong collection, currently dubbed Mythinformation, These are widely believed tales that have no basis in fact.

This is the first of a few excerpts that I will offer from a work, currently on the block, and possibly to be called either MythConceptions, or Oh No, They Didn't. It will look into all those legends that aren't true, bits like the bunyip, the speed of the botfly, 'one in a thousand', Pavlov ringing bells (he didn't), viruses and bacteria that are good for us, sharks that do get cancer, Victorian frills on table legs, a camel that shot a man and throwing Christians to the lions — among other gems of misinformation. Many of these, by the way, have already appeared in trhe almost 700 entries in this blog.

So: did Noah's Flood happen? Answer: not as specified in the Maker's Manual, Genesis 7.

* * * *

…and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
—Genesis 7, 19-20, KJV.

Around 400, St Augustine considered the distributions of the animals after Noah's flood, and suggested that either men or angels must have transported them to their present locations. Science says there never was a flood like Noah's, and so the present locations of kangaroos and koalas do not raise a real problem.

If there was a flood in Noah’s time, it certainly wasn’t as described in the Bible, and we know this because Thomas Jefferson was intelligent enough to consider the evidence, to apply science, mathematics and logic. As he saw it, there simply would not have been enough water available.

All the same, Jefferson was only a politician, planter and slave owner, so what would he know? On April 29 1962, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy addressed a gathering of 49 Nobel laureates at the White House with these words:

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Now that isn’t the sort of comment we might reasonably expect to hear either from, or about, the most recent incumbent of the Oval Office, but Jefferson (1743–1826) really was an amazing intellect. At a time when religious leaders mainly denied that fossils were traces of ancient life, and kept pushing the Biblical ‘truth’ of Genesis, claiming a 6000-year-old planet, Jefferson analysed the available information, and proved that Noah’s flood could never have happened. It appeared in his 1785 Notes on Virginia, and the relevant part reads like this:

The atmosphere, and all its contents, whether of water, air, or other matters, gravitate to the earth, that is to say, they have weight. Experience tells us, that the weight of all these together never exceeds that of a column of mercury of 31 inches height, which is equal to one of rain water of 35 feet high. If the whole contents of the atmosphere then were water, instead of what they are, it would cover the globe but 35 feet deep; but as these waters, as they fell, would run into the seas, the superficial measure of which is to that of the dry parts of the globe, as two to one, the seas would be raised only 52 1–2 feet above their present level, and of course would overflow the lands to that height only.

To put this in perspective, consider these events:

In 1695, John Woodward had published his Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth, proposing that fossils formed when Noah’s flood destroyed the surface of the earth.

In 1696, William Whiston had published his New Theory of the Earth, which suggested that Noah’s deluge might have been caused by a comet striking the earth.

In 1796 (after Jefferson’s analysis, Georges Cuvier attributed the succession of fossil forms to a series of simultaneous extinctions caused by natural catastrophes, one of them Noah’s flood.

In 1823 William Buckland published his Reliquiae Diluvianae, which attributed fossils to caves filled with mud during Noah’s flood.

Still, there may have been real floods, of a sort, happening around the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. In 1997, oceanographers William Ryan and Walter Pitman suggested that rising sea levels in the Mediterranean around 7500 years ago may have broken through the Bosphorus strait to plunge down into a freshwater lake, lying at a much lower level, producing an apocalyptic flood that may well have inspired legends such as the floods of Noah and Gilgamesh.

Later dredging of the Black Sea seemed to confirm that suggestion when an ancient beach was dredged at a depth of 170 metres (550 feet) and analysis revealed freshwater molluscs dated to 7500 years ago and saltwater species, dated to 6900 years ago.

On the other hand, there used to be people who said the planet is even younger than either of those dates. 

And I have dealt with that, as well.

Australia's Hidden Heroes

For too long, the story of how Australia was on the winning side in three wars (Boer War and two World Wars) has been hidden, thanks to government suspicion, fear, duplicity and inertia. Australia had two stalwart citizens, whose efforts tipped the balance in favour of the Allies.

One was known as Crooked Mick, a bush hero and strong man who hailed from the Speewah, and this tells of the exploits that he and his companion, a scientist named Henry Cruciform managed to pull off, while surrounded by foreign agents who were, as Mick once said in a candid moment, were "…worse than them Speewah blowflies, the ones that eat crocs".

Here for the first time, readers can learn how Mick and Henry rose to positions of secret prestige and influence, not only in Australia, but across the globe, due in large part to the reports of the foreign spies who gathered close around them, trying to win their secrets. In the world's corridors of power, the two were spoken of in hushed tones.

Here, the reader can learn of Crooked Mick's athletic prowess and how his scratch team of station hands beat the MCC at cricket; how Mick rode four bulls at once; his dog's mathematical skills; how he fought bushfires, floods and droughts; the Speewah girls' snake circus; the world's only Möbius dog; how a British officer at Gallipoli wanted Mick sent off for unsporting behaviour and how Mick sank several German submarines; how Mick sorted the drop bear problem; how Flash Jack drove 400 44-gallon drums from Speewah to the Big Smoke; how Smiling Annie's daughter told the time and other daily events in the Australian bush.

We also meet the many inventions and discoveries of Henry Cruciform, Australia's premier scientist who accidentally blew up Professor Moriarty while working with Sherlock Holmes to perfect the scientist's new explosive, nitrogum. Cruciform also invented radio, X-rays, the transistor and a fiendishly devastating form of psychological warfare.

It was Mick and Cruciform who shot down the Red Baron, and Cruciform acted as a strange attractor, so that during a single picnic lunch in Adelaide, he suggested the titles Forsyte Saga and Heart of Darkness to John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad respectively, as well as suggesting X-ray diffraction to William Bragg, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this very work.

History will never be the same, once these facts are known. Warning: the book contains the shocking truth about Mata Hari's time in Australia, how Professor Moriarty really died, the true genesis of the Boy Scouts, the music of Arnold Schönberg, and who really killed the Red Baron. Readers will need a strong stomach.

This book is hard to put down. I know, because I have already tried poison, flame-throwers, a knife and a squadron of tanks, and STILL the thing lives.

Not to beat about the bush, this is classic Australian yarn-spinning, coming from the only Australian author who is a trained con man who never went over to the dark side.

See a sample here

An ebook in full colour for Kindle $5.45

and a print-on-demand paperback, $25

The base page for all of these is here.

A history of climate change.

Jens Galschiot's installation, Unbearable, in Copenhagen

In the savage illustration on the right, the J-curve that is skewering the polar bear reflects the graph of the unstoppable rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the curve is made from lengths of oil pipe. Sometimes, art and politics go together very well. 

We have known about what we used to call ‘global warming’ for quite a while, since the 1950s, though it was predicted (as a theory) in the 1820s and explained in the 1850s. Now reputable atmospheric scientists all believe human activity is driving the modern warming of our climate. All the same, they agree that global warming is a bad description, so we call it ‘climate change’. Under any name, it’s the same beast, and the same looming disaster. The problem used to be that there was not a lot of hard science in the arguments, which come down to logic, reason, careful modelling—and interpretation that is likely to be biased by a generous serving of self-interest among the nay-sayers.

In 1856 at the AAAS Annual Meeting, the work of Eunice Foote was presented, showing that carbon dioxide is a heat-blanketing greenhouse gas that in the atmosphere could warm the Earth. This was years before the work of the men usually credited with the finding (Tyndall in England and Arrhenius in Sweden, and we will come to them in a bit). Her work was in a short piece in The American Journal of Science and Arts for 1856 begins on p. 382, and says: “An atmosphere of that gas [carbonic acid, CO2] would give our earth a high temperature …”

Even before that, in the 1820s, Joseph Fourier had realised that heat-trapping by what we now call greenhouse gases might occur. Then in 1856, Foote identified carbon dioxide as the most likely threat, before John Tyndall said much the same thing in 1861. Back then, nobody thought much about it, then Svante Arrhenius reminded us in 1896 that both water vapour and carbon dioxide were ‘greenhouse gases’ (escaping that bad analogy is hard) and so water and carbon dioxide would play a role in making the planet get warmer.

He also considered that changes might be happening, and consulted Arvid Högbom, who just happened to know all about carbon dioxide sources and sinks. Carbon dioxide was coming from animals when they breathed, from volcanoes, and from humans burning fossil and other fuels. Arrhenius thought the human additions were a very small part of the total in the air already, perhaps one part in a thousand was added by the burning of coal, and there were probably checks and balances. Arrhenius estimated that in 3000 years, the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide would double, but that such a doubling would raise world average temperatures by 5 to 6°C.

In 1896, the CO₂ level was around 290 parts per million: in 2016, the value was estimated at 396 parts per million: we had travelled one third of the distance in 120 years. In 2018, it was 407.4 ppm, and in May 2023, it reached a seasonal peak of 424 ppm. My back-of-the-envelope scribblings suggest we will double the 1896 value by the 2070s, after about 180 years, rather than 3000 years.

To Europeans back then, the warming effect seemed nothing to worry about, because nobody had stopped to consider the cascades, the flow-ons that might be driven by that rise in temperature. A thermodynamics expert, Walter Nernst, even wondered if it would be feasible to set fire to uneconomical and low-grade coal seams, so as to release enough carbon dioxide to warm the Earth’s climate deliberately!

In December 2019, Australia recorded its six hottest days ever, and 2023 now looks to be set to be the hottest ever, around the globe, but the trend was apparent even in 1950, when George Kimble reported in Scientific American that the northern limit of wheat-growing in Canada had moved northward some 200 or 300 miles (call it 400 kilometres), adding that farmers in southern Ontario were experimenting with growing cotton. While the Canadian cotton industry seems not to have taken off yet, he reported another trend that continues to this day, the northward retreat of the permafrost:

In parts of Siberia the southern boundary of permanently frozen ground is receding poleward several dozen yards per annum.

The matter open to question back in 1950 was the cause. Kimble noted that the Domesday Book listed 38 vineyards in England in 1086, in addition to those of the Crown. He pointed to the Greenland colony which was frozen out, back around the mid-1400s and other evidence that climates change. He looked also at Biblical evidence on the distribution of date palms to suggest that conditions in 1950 were much like those of Biblical times, providing a picture of a climate that fluctuates around a mean. Nothing to see here…

In the 1990s, global warming was in much the same position that “continental drift” had been in, a generation earlier, with some of the scientists arguing furiously, even when they agreed on the main principles, and as in the puzzle of the wandering continents, the key evidence was all there. The problem is that once again we were stuck with a bad analogy, just as the early 1960s saw us hung up on “continental drift”.

Mind you, when I covered the 2002 Spring Conference of the American Geophysical Union, there were no nay-sayers there on plate tectonics or climate change. The problem is that so long as people can get away with saying “global warming”, we are once again stuck with a bad label, just as the early 1960s saw us hung up on “continental drift”.

Scientists are always slow to move to a new model, a new way of understanding, something called a paradigm, and I lived through the plate tectonics paradigm shift, and saw some of the brawling. There was fuss and bother along the way, but in the end, the good science was recognised and accepted.

Now about the ‘greenhouse effect’: in cold climates, a greenhouse is a glass shed which allows sunlight to shine in, where much of the energy is absorbed and changed to heat. Glass is less transparent to heat than it is to light, but a greenhouse does not just trap warmth that way: it also holds a body of warm air around the plants, and protects them from wind-driven evaporation. So while we still speak of ‘greenhouse gases’, it is rare to hear anybody mention the greenhouse effect these days.

In the last ten years we have seen how the climate spin-doctors were using the same crooked tactics that were used to hide the harm that tobacco does. Nowadays, nobody denies that the Earth is getting warmer, because the evidence is there, but we stay with the less-easy-to-lie about climate change.

Why? Mainly, the cost of disagreement and bickering is higher in this fight. It mattered not at all if people disagreed about plate tectonics (except, perhaps, that it makes tsunamis like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami easier to understand), but global warming will be a major disaster for humanity, and any delay has the potential to cost lives. To understand this, we have to accept some puzzling propositions.

To take one example, the formation of cold salty water in the Norwegian Sea is probably what stops Dublin and New York being iced-in each winter. This is because of the cold brine that drives a current known as the Conveyor, which in turn drives the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream takes warm water from the Caribbean and swirls it up around the North Atlantic, contributing to fogs and breaking icebergs loose, but keeping many ports warm and open, even in winter.

Just as the prion proteins of mad cow disease have more than one stable form, so do weather patterns, and if the weather once drops into a new pattern, we may not be able to bounce it back to where it started. A golf ball in a wok lies at the bottom, and if you move it and let it go, it will roll back down. That is a stable system. A golf ball, sitting on a long cardboard tube doesn’t fall, so we might say it is stable, but if you knocked it over, it wouldn’t come back to this position. We say it is metastable.

The golf ball on the tube is stable to small nudges, but only within limits. Humpty Dumpty had two positions, one on the wall and one off it, and according to the nursery rhyme, the second was a position of no return. On the wall, Humpty Dumpty was metastable, but beside the wall, he was stable, and broken.

Climate patterns are either stable or metastable. If they are pushed too hard, they may ‘flip’ into a new metastable pattern (or even break), and only then, too late, do we discover that they were metastable (or even breakable). The best example of a probably metastable pattern is the monsoon system that waters much of Asia and the north of Australia, but El Niño and Indian Ocean Dipole are other possibles.

Climate scientists worry that severe changes may deliver a push that will take a metastable pattern away from what we know, and there might be no way of returning to the original pattern. The good news is that as northern Europe freezes over, the glaciers which are now melting away fast will be replenished, lowering sea levels. The increased snow cover will also increase the reflectivity of the northern hemisphere, and that may cool the planet down a little. We just have to hope it does not trigger a new stable pattern that happens to be an ice age.

The actual changes that might follow any breaking point are hard to predict. They are unlikely to be spectacular and major, and probably they will do their harm stealthily, when roads, bridges, port facilities and cities are flooded, or when agricultural land is lost, either by being covered by the sea or as a result of drastically changed rainfall patterns.

If rock is exposed in Antarctica, this could lead to a low pressure zone over the icy continent that could change weather patterns around the world. It hasn’t happened yet, but we need to learn from history. Ten years ago, no politician would take a long-term view and force the changes needed in the next thirty to forty years, when most of them are elected for a mere three to four years, before they face the voters again.

It is easier to bleat plaintively that there is no real agreement among the scientists yet (there is, actually), or that some eminent scientists (they aren’t eminent: just look at where their funding comes from) believe there are other explanations. That saves the politicians from having to act—and the honesty of scientists in saying that they cannot be sure just how things will go wrong allows devious short-term opportunists to prattle that “the scientists aren’t sure…”.

Politics is a marvellous human discovery. It is a pity that politicians still have to discover humanity and consider its prospects. It is likely that politics, dithering, duck-shoving and shilly-shallying will make this disaster happen, and many of the effects will seem to be unrelated to the climate.

Take dengue (pronounced den-GAY) fever, which is caused by the dengue fever virus, which is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. The geographic range of Aedes aegypti is limited by freezing temperatures that kill overwintering larvae and eggs, so dengue virus transmission is limited to tropical and subtropical regions.

Aedes albopictus is also capable of spreading dengue fever. As a rule, the Aedes mosquitoes are recognizable by their striped legs (which give Aedes albopictus its nickname of ‘tiger mosquito’), and the fact that they bite by day.

Dengue fever involves an internal haemorrhage that sometimes leads to shock—a drop in blood pressure and failure of blood cells to meet the metabolic demands of the body. It is a leading cause of death among children in Southeast Asia, killing about 1% of all cases. It includes four distinct viruses or serotypes, dengue 1 through dengue 4. As in the case of malaria, mosquitoes become infected with dengue after taking a blood meal from a dengue-infected person.

People infected with dengue virus develop dengue fever or dengue haemorrhagic fever. Dengue fever is also known as ‘breakbone disease’ because of severe headache and joint pain associated with it. Dengue haemorrhagic fever is far more serious than the rarely fatal dengue fever.

After a short incubation period of 1 or 2 weeks, the mosquito can transmit the infection to a susceptible person. An infection with any of the four serotypes confers protective lifelong immunity, but only to that serotype. The risk of developing haemorrhagic dengue appears to be increased among people later infected with a different serotype. In recent years, haemorrhagic dengue has become increasingly common in tropical America.

Climate change is expected not only to increase the range of the mosquito but would also reduce the size of the mosquito’s larval size and, ultimately, its adult size. Since smaller adults must feed more frequently to develop their eggs, warmer temperatures would boost the frequency of double feeding and increase the chance of transmission, which will happen when the first person bitten is carrying the virus.

Warmer temperatures reduce the incubation time for the virus. The incubation period of the dengue type-2 virus is 12 days at 30°C, but seven days at 32 to 35°C. Half the world’s population is currently at risk from the disease, and it has recently become a serious problem in Latin America. Brazil alone had a quarter of a million cases in 1997.

Dengue is hard to eradicate once it is established. In Australia, it reappeared in north Queensland in 1981 after being absent for some 25 years, and it spreads each year through the areas of northern Australia where the Aedes aegypti mosquito is found, though cases are reported from across Australia each year, as a result of people being infected in either the north of the continent or overseas.

There have been suggestions in the past that global warming could lead to a spread of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and thus the disease, but at the moment, Australian cases seem to be limited to about 200 a year. There is, however, a massive increase in cases across the whole of the western Pacific. Our turn will come…

Haycock goes bankrupt

This is a second out-take that didn't fit my upcoming Australia: a Social History.  The work began with The Big Book of Australian History, which went through four editions under the National Library of Australia's imprint. but as they have lost the plot, I am going my own way.

This version is 2.5 times the size of the original version. Soon, I will be seeking a publisher...

* * *

The man identified by Henry Brown as W. W. Haycock, appears to have usually used the name George Washington Haycock. Brown later called Haycock one of those who had been convicted of no crime, but who, nonetheless, “have found themselves in scrapes which have compelled them to leave their own country”. As we will see later, that was not his real name, but “Haycock” began to take a prominent position in local affairs around Bendigo (or Sandhurst, as it was then called) in 1856. He was a trader, and one of the town’s principal merchants. Nothing could be done, Brown said, unless Haycock agreed to it. The American was admired, and he helped many less successful traders, but Brown took an instinctive dislike to him. Brown thought the praise given to Haycock seemed unwarranted, but still the man did well.

Then, one day, Brown found he had been right to trust his instincts:

…we were astonished one day by receiving the following communication by express,—

“Confidential. Melbourne.” “Haycock, we believe, has bolted; we inclose a draft of Two Hundred and Fifty Pounds, payable at his office in Sandhurst, which he gave us a week since, obtain the money if possible, remit to Melbourne, and keep this communication a secret, for we may be mistaken.”
— Henry Brown, Victoria As I Found It, 228 – 9.

The message came from a good friend, so Brown went seeking the money, only to be told Haycock was in Melbourne, there was no money on hand, and that Haycock would return in two or three days.

Brown pushed them, saying the order was made payable on demand, and in the end, Haycock’s credit being so good, his clerk went out and borrowed the money from other firms. A week later, the news was all over Bendigo, and people who had been caught out feared going bankrupt. When Brown told his friends he had no dealings with Haycock, they reminded him that other firms would also “go smash”, but Brown had settled up accounts with all the at-risk houses during the previous week.

One American store and hotel-keeper had made a great deal of money, but having injured himself, placed all of his savings in Haycock’s hands, on the promise that the men would meet in Melbourne, where Haycock would pay over the cash. Then he headed for Melbourne to take a ship home to retirement, but the money never came. He missed his ship, and feared that Haycock and his money were on board. Then another American told the truth about Haycock, and the man realised he had lost everything.

The truth-teller knew Haycock was an assumed name, because the two had grown up in the same small town. He was liked, did well, and when a fire almost ruined him, his friends helped him get going again. Then, one day, Haycock bolted, running off with a large amount of money, and people began wondering if his fire had been suspicious.

He went to the American “Slave States” where he married a lovely girl, the daughter of a planter, but three days later, he deserted her and went to California. His brother-in-law caught up with him there and abused him for deserting his wife, at which point they agreed to duel. Haycock’s first shot pierced his brother-in-law’s heart. People were furious, so he cleared out again, and the narrator came across him, working a neighbouring claim near Bendigo. When he addressed Haycock by his real name, the man asked him to keep his secret and use only his new name.

“Haycock” said he was a reformed character. The narrator saw no use in “outing” him, when he was so poor. Soon after, though, he put up a small tent and began buying old tools, such as broken picks, damaged cradles. He would mend these and sell them, did well, and soon Haycock was well-known as an agent, cattle dealer, and general merchant.

All this time I watched his conduct narrowly, and could see nothing amiss, besides he was a sad man, and in the midst of his success, it seemed to me, that his former crimes weighed heavily upon him; for many of you will remember how rare was his smile, and a laugh proceeding from those lips, I think, you have none of you ever heard.
— Henry Brown, Victoria As I Found It, 234.

Brown said everybody just assumed that Haycock had run off with all the money, but after he was found drowned, it emerged that he had got a barber to shave off his long beard, and pawned a pistol. He must have wandered the countryside, hungry and fearing his creditors, people said.

Later, some gentlemen of Bendigo and elsewhere were summoned to Geelong to confirm that the exhumed corpse of a drowned man was Haycock. The statement below, taken from the pages of The Argus, has been abbreviated by the deletion of some irrelevant legal formalities.

We, Thomas Kirk Newton, of Melbourne, gentleman; Thomas Disher, of the same place, gentleman; James Boone, of Sandhurst, doctor of medicine; Decimus Prothero, of Bathurst, New South Wales, gentleman; Sumner Cummings Fraser, of Sandhurst, drover; and Robert Hadin Smith, of Melbourne, articled clerk, severally and respectively do solemnly and sincerely declare that we have this day exhumed and carefully examined the body said to be that of the late George Washington Haycock, late of Sandhurst aforesaid, and that the said body is that of the said George Washington Haycock, beyond doubt or dispute…

(Signed) Thos. Kirk Newton, Thomas Disher, James Boone M.D., Decimus Prothero, Sumner Cummings Fraser, Robert H. Smith. Declared at Geelong, in the colony of Victoria, this 30th day of September, A.D. 1856, before me (signed) Charles Ibbotson, J.P.
— The Argus, 1 October 1856, 5.

Some people had their doubts about the identification, and at least one of them said so, rather forcefully, in this curious letter, signed ‘Vox’. According to ‘Vox’, the report signed by Newton, Disher, Boone, Prothero, Fraser, and R. H. Smith was not only puerile, but childish, not creditable to those gentlemen. The writer was not prepared to accept their identification.

Let six men of only common sense examine the disputed body, take the height and weight, a plaster cast of the face, a few photographic likenesses, some of the hair, and general and particular description of his body; give this to the public, and they will determine for themselves. If this is not enough, seal up the body in a zinc shell, and forward it to Bendigo, where I am disposed to believe there will be found some Bendigonians who can determine the question.
— Bendigo Advertiser, 15 October 1856, 2.

Without some effort, “the majority here will continue to believe that the body in question is not that of G. W. Haycock.” One of those pilloried, Decimus Prothero, was a wealthy grazier from Bathurst, and he had “had dealings” with Haycock. One of these dealings was a mob of 12,000 cattle that crossed the Murray into Victoria in late August 1856, about the time Haycock ran off. In all probability, Prothero had lost money in those dealings.

Prothero did not appreciate the tone of the letter, and having identified ‘Vox’, he took the law into his own hands. Before we look at the ensuing court case, here is a fact that the Bendigo Advertiser added when they reprinted the letter: one of the six gentlemen in the statement was Haycock’s “medical attendant” (in other words, Dr Boone), and he recognised the body by certain scars that it bore.

So Prothero was right to be annoyed, though he may have been just a little robust in his actions, but ‘Vox’, alias Hutchison was hardly a model of rectitude in making his comments! In the following report from the Mount Alexander Mail, one reference may need explanation: “Professor Sands” was a well-known hairdresser and barber. Prothero appeared before Messrs. M’Lachlan, Hunt, and Emmett, at the police office, Sandhurst, to answer a charge of having, the day before, assaulted Dr. Hutchison. He entered a plea of guilty. Hutchison said he was standing on the previous afternoon outside the Shamrock Hotel, when the defendant came up and asked if his name was Acheson, and he said it was not. The defendant went away, then returned to ask if his name was Hutchison. He confirmed this, at which point Prothero pointed to a folded newspaper that he held. Was he the author of a letter in that paper? At this point, we switch to the published account.

Complainant said that if his name was attached to any letter in any paper he certainly was the author of it, but if his name was not appended to it, he should decline to answer any question put by a mere stranger in the public streets. Defendant then seized complainant by the beard and plucked it out, and one of the bystanders then interfered and took the defendant away…

The defendant here explained that he had acted upon strong provocation. He had been in company with some other gentlemen, to Geelong, for the purpose of identifying the body of G. W. Haycock, and had done so, and having stated that he considered the body to be absolutely and truly that of Mr. Haycock, a letter had appeared in the Bendigo Advertiser calling his word into question, and this letter he had ascertained was written by the complainant. He did not deny the assault: he certainly had pulled the Doctor’s beard out, and now begged to return it to him.

(Defendant here drew from his pocket the complainant’s beard, wrapped in paper, and suggested that Professor Sands would stick it on again for eightpence.)

The bench found that a most unwarrantable assault had been committed, that free speech ought to be allowed without risk, and Mr Prothero was to recollect he was not in California. The defendant was to be fined £10, or in default of payment ten days’ imprisonment. The fine was immediately paid. Haycock’s disappearance may well have cost Prothero dearly, because Prothero himself disappeared from the Australian scene rather oddly, the following year, after this announcement in the Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal:

Sir, I write to request you to be good enough to insert in your next publication the fact that I, finding my affairs in a state of hopeless entanglement, have gone to England for the purpose of seeing my friends, who are rich and respectable, and who will, I believe, do anything to avert dishonour from the family. My absence will, I hope, be no more than seven months.

“Your obedient servant, DECIMUS PROTHERO.
— Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, 7 October 1857, 3.

He seems to have stayed in Britain.

The sum of two cubes in two different ways

This is a continuation of an entry last March on Ramanujan and the sums of two cubes. If the title makes no sense, start there.

This expands the list of solutions, and below it, I reveal my Diophantine approach to spreadsheets. I should note here that one of my most successful fraud investigations (the precise details of the client remain commercial-in-confidence) only worked because I used a spreadsheet to divine the cunning way a wages swindle was being run.

All I needed was a stapler and a pie chart, but to find out how I managed to get the data and wring out the answer, you need to ply me with beer.

If you make it a Guinness, I will also throw in a practical demonstration of isostasy: look behind the harp in this shot, and see if you can spot it.

Anyhow, here are my solutions:

-9728: 16³ + -24³; -12³ + -20³

-7657: -20³ + 7³; -17³ + -14³

-6832: -19³ + 3³; -18³ + -10³

-5859: -18³ + -3^3; -19³ + 10³

-5824: -18³ + 2³; -16³ + -12³

-5256: -17³ + -7³; -20³ + 14³

-5103:-15³ + -12³; -18³ + 9³

-4104: -15³ + -9³; -16³ + -2³; -18³ + 12³ TRIPLE!

-3367: -16³ + 9³; -15³ + 2³

-3087: -14³ + -7³; -20³ + 17³

-2457: -18³ + 15³; -12³ + -9³

-1736: -12³ + -2³; -18³ + 16³

-1729: -9³ + -10³; -1³ + -12³

-1512: -10³ + -8³; -12³ + 6³

-1216: -12³ + 8³; -10³ + -6³

-1027: -19³ + 18³; -10³ + -3³

-999: -12³ + 9³; -10³ + 1³

-728: -12³ + 10³; -9³ + 1³; -8³ + -6³ TRIPLE!

-721: -16³ + 15³; -9³ + 2³

-513: -9³ + 6³; -8³ + -1³

-217: -6³ + -1³; -9³ + 8³

-189: -6³ + 3³; -5³ + -4

-152: -5³ + -3³; -6³ + 4³

-91: -4³ + -3³; -6³ + 5³

91: 4³ + 3³; 6³ + -5³

152: 5³ + 3³; 6³ + -4³

189: 6³ + -3³; 5³ + 4

217: 6³ + 1³; 9³ + -8³

513: 9³ + -6³; 8³ + 1³

721: 16³ + -15³; 9³ + -2³

728: 12³ + -10³; 9³ + -1³; 8³ + 6³ TRIPLE!

999: 12³ + -9³; 10³ + -1³

1027: 19³ + -18³; 10³ + 3³

1216: 12³ + -8³; 10³ + 6³

1512: 10³ + 8³; 12³ + -6³

1729: 9³ + 10³; 1³ + 12³

1736: 12³ + 2³; 18³ + -16³

2457: 18³ + -15³; 12³ + 9³

3087: 14³ + 7³; 20³ + -17³

3367: 16³ + -9³; 15³ + -2³

4104: 15³ + 9³; 16³ + 2³; 18³ + -12³ TRIPLE

5103:15³ + 12³; 18³ + -9³

5256: 17³ + 7³; 20³ + -14³

5824: 18³ + -2³; 16³ + 12³

5859: 18³ + 3^3; 19³ + -10³

6832: 19³ + -3³; 18³ + 10³

7657: 20³ + -7³; 17³ + 14³

9728: -16³ + 24³; 12³ + 20³

Here is the base spreadsheet that spat out all the sums of two cubes where the source numbers were -20 to 20:

This is a bit kludgy, but once row 2 was done, I could use FILL-DOWN.

Next, I copied all of the sums of two cubes into a document, sorted them into order, and pasted them into column A of a fresh spreadsheet in column A. Column B had in B2  =IF(A1=A2, "hit","").  

Next, I deleted the non-hit rows, and knew what to look for: here's a sample of the target list:

Now I was ready to search the first spreadsheet, and this was where I copied Diophantus. I might have come up with a routine that did it for me, but it was faster and less brain-damaging just to hack away.

I have been known to sneer at geography a colouring-in, but as I am colour blind, I think I'm allowed to do that. Anyhow, I used colouring-in to pin down my pairs:

All that remained to do now was to check the cells and enter the source values, but as I was doing this manually, I set a check in column E, where E1 read =C1*C1*C1+D1*D1*D1, followed by COPY-DOWN.

For more on 1729, see https://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com/2015/05/adventures-with-1729.html or

https://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com/2019/02/of-cubes-and-smart-lazy.html or

https://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com/2022/03/was-ramanujan-wrong-or-wrongly-reported.html

My book of STEAM activities for bright young minds, Playwiths, has a number of labour-saving ideas involving spreadsheets, and about 1729 and Ramanujan, but now I need to add some extra stuff, based on what I have written here.

There was a time when hacking was an honourable activity, when the Kalashnikov rifle was described as a hack, and my fraud-busting spreadsheet was most emphatically a hack. We cannot turn the linguistic clock back to save hack, but we can at least try to make recreational computing respectable again!

 

Understanding technology

This is a small excerpt from Not Your Usual Clever Ideas, which is about crazy ideas that occasionally pay off. I published it some years ago, and I will upload a revised version in the first week of September.

Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do…The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!

—Alan Kay.

Legend has it that Niels Bohr said “Prediction is difficult—especially about the future”. Bohr himself always claimed that somebody else said it, but whoever said it first, the statement remains true. Logical consequences only look logical when we view them from the other side, when we can see which scraps of context really counted. Even Arthur C. Clarke (who predicted communications satellites in 1945) never saw the full potential when he wrote his first outline of it.

Some many years ago, I proposed the idea of the 50-year effect, when I was writing a history of rockets. While I pursue many temporary obsessions in my writing, I have allowed room for only one permanent obsession, and this is it, because the 50-year effect explains why we can never predict the social effects of any technology when it is invented.

The effect probably has the same duration as a human working life because it takes a while for the old fogeys who do not know, understand or appreciate the new technology to die off, making room for younger people who are familiar with the technology to reach the top of the ladder. In fact, the real effects generally begin to appear about 30 years after an invention, but they remain less than totally clear until 50 years after the invention was first set loose in public.

Consider this 1884 essay, describing how a New Zealand lighthouse keeper’s life might be changed for the better, by the application of the telephone, a device that was invented in 1876, and thus well-known and talked-about by then, but little-experienced at that time:

We have been in the habit of thinking that no life was so lonely as that of the keeper of a lighthouse, and are apt to compassionate the men who are cut off from all intercourse with their kind for weeks by stormy weather or by the difficulties of their position. But the telephone (says a New Zealand paper) has cured all that as by a miracle. Let the storm rage how it may, the lighthouse keeper at Tiritiri can speak in a whisper to Auckland or Waiwera. He is not permitted to forget the days of the week as they slip by, or when the Day of Rest comes round, for the clerks in the Auckland office, when discharging Sunday morning duties, can connect him through, and in his lonely watch-tower, with the moaning sea all round, he can hear the Salvation Army band in Shortland-street and Queen-street playing ‘The Sweet By-and-by,’ or some other of Moody and Sankey’s airs. From the same place he can, too, hear every morning someone in the office at Waiwera read the newspapers. All this through several miles of cable at the bottom of the sea, and, by the detour as it goes, some sixty miles of land line.

It conjures up a pretty picture, but one that would fall foul of the dreadful acoustics of the early telephones, not to mention that the clerks’ telephone in Auckland would be bolted to a wall, far from the band. In other words, the journalist must have made it all up as he went along.

The telephone was slowly winning acceptance in some offices around 1900, but it had apparently led Sir William Preece, the chief engineer in the British Post Office to say, some years earlier, when asked if the new device would be of any value:

“No, sir. The Americans have need of the telephone—but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys”.

By 1914, people in New York could talk to people in San Francisco by telephone, and it became common in at least the wealthier homes in the western world around 1930, 54 years after it was invented.

(There is an amusing side-story here, known to all those who have worked in surveying and statistical sampling: in 1936, the Literary Digest surveyed its own subscribers and automobile owners, followed up by a phone poll, and concluded that Landon would beat Roosevelt in the Presidential elections. FDR won by a landslide, and the error happened because all three sample groups were well-off or rich, and so less likely to vote for Roosevelt.)

After 20 years, people have mostly heard about a new idea, after 30 years, the technology is growing popular but still developing. After 50 years, we can call the technology mature. It does not matter if you look at printing, the telescope, the telegraph, the railway, photography, cinema, radio, heavier-than-air flight, television, or the internet. Within a tolerance of a few years, the 30-year/50-year effect holds in every case.

It is no coincidence that the books produced in the first 50 years after Gutenberg started using the printing press are called incunabula, a term that refers to the clothing of infants. It was only after one full human working life that the idea of printing had been taken on board by both scholars and the people in the printing trade. It had become a mature technology.

When he produced the second edition of his second book, the Mainz Psalter in 1459, Gutenberg had proven the technology of printing. Even so, he could never have anticipated two books published 400 years on, in 1859, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species or Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities—or those books’ effects.

Equally, he could not have anticipated that a woman, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) might publish Adam Bede, nor could he have anticipated Isabella Beeton’s Household Management, or John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, all of which came out in 1859. He most certainly would have been utterly confused by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, conceived in 1862 and published in 1865.

Gutenberg was content to have created a system that could produce 180 bibles in the time that a diligent penman needed to complete a single copy by hand. He could never have dreamed that in Mainz in 2008, outside a museum devoted to his work, newspapers from many nations would be sold to foreign tourists on the day of their publication, after being flown in. Museums, newspapers, tourists and flying would have made no sense to him at all.

There's more, but you'll have to buy the book :-)

That speedy botfly

I revived this excerpt from my out-of-print book The Speed of Nearly Everything when the image on the right turned up in my Facebook feed, coming from Science Humor.

In case you don't look out for details, the hole that the fly was caught in (or poked into) was actually made by a projectile coming from the other side, so the accompanying question about the fly's speed is, at the very least, just a bit misleading, but somebody is going to cite a legend.

When you enquire about fast animals, more often than not, you will read that the fastest animal of all is the deer botfly, which is credited with an amazing 1287 km/hr, though if you convert this to miles per hour, it comes out as a round 800 mph, a figure that smells a little bit like fudged science—and rightly so.

The story begins with a 1927 article by an entomologist called Charles Henry Tyler Townsend, who reported a speed like this in the Journal of the New York Entomological Society. He actually claimed that the fly was clipping along at 400 yards per second, which works out at 818 mph or 1316 km/hr in metric units. As we will see shortly, any preciseness in the conversion is hardly justified.

Townsend reasoned that these flies passed in a blur, and so must have been travelling very fast. On that scientific basis and no other, he credited them with a nice round 400 yards/second.

That story should have been questioned right away, but people wrote it down, passed it on, quoted it uncritically, and never stopped to wonder what would happen if flies were tearing around at supersonic speeds.

As we will see later (next entry in this blog), some people would stop to prove that the bumblebee could not fly, but nobody stopped to consider and demonstrate the impossibility of the botfly claim until 1938, when Irving Langmuir, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, having given it some thought, tested the assumptions.

First, the air pressure on the fly at that speed would be more than half an atmosphere, surely enough to crush it. The energy needed to maintain the flight would be 370 watts, half a horsepower, which would be quite an ask. Aside from anything else, the botfly would use up its own weight in fuel every second, so it would need to be a voracious feeder.

Next, Langmuir had been hit by these flies, and while it hurt, that weight of fly at 1300 km/hr would have left a significant hole, rather like that of a soft bullet, and the fly would have been mashed inside the wound. Instead, the fly bounced off.

Langmuir mocked up a model of the botfly, using solder to make a pellet that was 1 cm long and 0.5 cm wide. He attached this to a string, and whirled it around his head, timing it so he could work out its velocity. He reported that at 13 mph it was a blur, at 26 mph it was barely visible, at 43 mph an observer could not tell which way it was going, and at 64 mph, it was completely invisible.

He concluded that the blur Townsend had seen came from a fly travelling at 25 mph (40 km/hr). His results were published in Science and reported in Time magazine, but legends are tough things, even when they are debunked by Nobel Prize winners. So even today, the same old values keep emerging from the woodwork.

By a curious chance, Langmuir’s name crept into the record books in an entirely different way in 2006 when plasma physicists used a specially designed holographic-strobe camera to capture pictures of matter waves that were travelling at 99.997% of the speed of light.

Known as Langmuir waves, they are generated by intense laser pulses, and may one day lead to “tabletop” versions of high-energy particle accelerators. One step along the way was taking photographs of the waves to see if they behaved the way scientists thought they would. They did, which is more than we can say about the botfly's behaviour.

Magic, medicine and technology

This morning, I saw a picture of a truck on which the owner had painted "Jesus is my vaccine". I immediately began to write a piece that referenced this quotation:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

— Clarke’s Third Law, Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1973.

When I went to dig that out of my files, I recalled that I had written about this same matter at the start of my e-book, Not Your Usual Treatments, so I just plundered that. You don't need to read the book (though you'll never be the same if you do!). Here are the salient bits.

I use four different computing devices at different times, and for different purposes. Each uses a different sig file for emails, and right now, the message below appears under emails sent from my tablet:

Away from my desk, and using something with technology sufficiently advanced to pass for magic, given the right lighting. The fully indistinguishable bit will come with the next upgrade.

The sort of people I work and play with recognise that as a reference to Clarke’s Third Law. They probably also know the unofficial corollary: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”

My friends live in the world of logic, science and technology. They know what I know: that when we find “magic” being presented as real, rather than as entertainment, we’re in the presence of ignorance, or fraud, or both. Nearby, we will find charlatans and/or the gullible.

I first encountered “magic” when I was about 13. I had a severe rope burn on my leg, and my uncle had been dabbling with a new “religion”. He treated the burn using a neat trick taught to adherents of this movement. His sons, younger than me, mispronounced the trick as “touch and fix”.

Like most conjuring tricks, it was simple. He repeatedly touched my skin near the wound, asking each time if I could feel it, and in the end, according to my mother who watched the process, he was scraping his fingernail down the wound, quite hard — and I was reporting no pain.

Basically, this was desensitisation, a matter of overloading the pain receptors so they stopped sending strong pain signals. I was a scientifically-inclined child and I knew, even then, about desensitisation and deception. On the other hand, my mother, a life-long gullible, was impressed. Even though this was the first rope burn she had ever seen, she told all and sundry that no rope burn in history had ever recovered so quickly.

She was just about ready to sign us all up to join the group, which would have been a salutary experience for them, having me inside the tent and still aiming inwards, but my uncle realised they were dangerous, dropped them, and warned her off.

Desensitisation is easily explained by science. It is simple technology, but in the wrong hands, it can easily be packaged to look like something close to magic. In the wrong hands, it can wreak havoc, much as I would have done, inside the tent.

Almost anything in the wrong hands can wreak havoc.

In Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl showed us that the frozen leg of a fluffy lamb makes a grand club for braining somebody. The poison in 200 kg of potatoes will kill anybody persuaded to eat them, and a medicinal leech in a soldier’s drinking water may attach inside his throat and choke him to death. Any book, placed in a drum of cement, and tied to the ankle of a literary critic may be used, in damp environments of sufficient depth, to improve the human gene pool.

It’s all about context and intent. Medical havoc usually comes when a person lacks any basic knowledge of a technology, culture or set of procedures. Guided by a charlatan (or being a charlatan), the ignorant person adopts or constructs a nonsensical explanation of reality, and applies it without any thought, or hesitation.

In ignorant minds, analogy sounds as good as analysis, and by a false analogy with scurvy, cancers can be blamed on dietary deficiencies. It’s an easy slide, all the way down the slippery slope after that. Some users progress to believing that one can eliminate TB by rubbing the patient’s brow with crystals. Soon, the very same treatment is credited with fixing headaches, beating sunstroke, banishing syphilis and mending varicose veins.

Filled with excitement, the converts claim that eating worms mends broken bones, that a tea made from a noxious weed stops HIV in its tracks, or that snake bite is cured by injections of meerkat urine. These people enter a frauds’ universe where, while many things are still impossible, they, the victims, don’t know it. This is not magic, they parrot — just advanced and esoteric science that the listener could never comprehend.

To be fair, some of the frauds are the victims of self-delusion, but they are still a threat to public health. In 1709, Alexander Pope wrote in An Essay on Criticism, “A little learning is a dangerous thing”, though this is usually seen and heard as “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.

This book is about people with little knowledge or learning, and no inclination to find out — and about people with a great deal of knowledge of deception, and a strong inclination to find money.

I originally planned to look at Australian quacks, but I soon realised that context and intent are all-important, that most “quacks” were nothing of the sort — and that strange medicine knows no borders. In the end, I realised I simply had to spread the net wider, but there is still a strong emphasis on the Australian side of this story.

One generation’s orthodox medicine is seen by the next generation as out-and-out quackery, and the only thing that has changed is the dominant paradigm, the accepted model of what makes us ill.

Occasionally, a far-seeing practitioner has been denounced as a quack, before later being proven right. These rare examples of genius struggling along, unrecognised, are just what the frauds and charlatans need.

“They laughed at Einstein,” they jeer, trying on their Einstein wigs.

All the same, there is a difference between the medically trained lone-wolf pioneer and the fraud. The pioneer was merely working to a different paradigm, while the charlatan works only to a greed paradigm.

Henry Cruciform's transmitting piano

A bit of background: I have just published a new book, Australia's Hidden Heroes: Crooked Mick of the Speewah and Henry Cruciform, and you can read more about the book here.

Among bush folk, Crooked Mick is still remembered, but even science historians like my friends know little about him, but I have recently gained access to the Cruciform Papers, and shared his stories. This account covers one of his wartime exploits, one which required a gifted pianist, a consummate mathematician and a highly creative mind, all in one person

 It reveals for the first time just how complex the secret war was that was waged between 1914 and 1918, when nothing was what it seemed—and the same applied in World War II, when the by-now septuagenarian Cruciform answered his country's call. Sadly, the needs of national security still preclude telling major parts of the story.

*

Cruciform's first hoodwink project involved some further developments on radio transmission, in particular, the use of his previously developed transmitting piano to send coded messages which sounded like bad piano playing. This was probably (but not definitely) intended as a hoax to play against the German High Command.

The scheme succeeded, as the German Intelligence authorities enthusiastically adopted the scheme and used it with great success. The ‘music’ which transpired helped to sap the moral fibre and fighting will of the average German soldier. Convinced that the Allies were using the same system, the Germans spent a great deal of time trying to decode Cruciform’s random transmissions.

Sir Edward Elgar’s knighthood was awarded for the work he did on the Enigma Variations, which totally defeated the German decoding efforts during the war (with fiendish cunning, the variations contained no code at all, making them very difficult to decode accurately). Some incidental evidence suggests that George Gershwin was performing a similar role for the American forces, while still a teenager.

Fearful that the same code systems would be used again in World War II, the Germans developed the Enigma coding and decoding machine in the 1930s, based on the action of a barrel organ, but playing at supersonic speed.

Cruciform solved this problem for the Allies in World War II, recording the German messages on 78 rpm records, and playing them back on the 33 rpm turntable which he invented for the purpose, but this also will be dealt with in more detail in the forthcoming second volume of Cruciform’s scientific papers.

The project backfired to a certain extent when, during the chaos of post-war Berlin, the memoirs of a German general were mistakenly coded for piano transmission. This would have caused no problem, except that his publisher was also a music publisher, and the result was erroneously released to an unprepared and unsuspecting public, allegedly as the collected works of Arnold Schönberg and Anton von Webern.

By coincidence, there really was an Arnold Schönberg, a little-known composer of rustic polkas and lyric love ballads who happily took the credit and royalties for the cacophony published over his name, although he then needed to compose his simple and derivative tunes under the pseudonym Karl-Heinz Stockaitken-Wassermann. This caused him some problems, as the end of his name invariably fell off the royalty cheques, and he died in poverty, being buried in the same paupers’ grave as W. A. Mozart.

Anton von Webern was wholly imaginary, and his alleged existence remained an embarrassment to the whole musical world until his ‘death’ was staged at the end of World War II, with the agreement of all the Allied and Axis powers, after Eisenhower had asked to meet either him or a Lieutenant Kije of the Red Army.

The story that von Webern was shot dead by an American sentry while slipping outside for a crafty cigarette was deemed so unbelievable that the authorities thought, correctly, that people would believe it. When Eisenhower was told that Kije had fallen victim to Beria’s thugs, he decided to enter politics, and was elected President of the USA in 1952. All of this arose only because of Cruciform’s work during World War I, but we are getting ahead of our story.

By 1913, as has already been mentioned, Cruciform had fitted a transmitter to an ‘Ampico’ reproducing piano. The ‘Ampico’ is able to reproduce every nuance of the original player’s performance, causing Busoni’s widow to burst into tears when she heard one of her husband’s piano rolls played after his death. [1]

During World War II, each secret agent’s ‘hand’ on the Morse key could be separately recognised. If a major deception was to be achieved concerning the ‘piano coder’, then a foolproof method of reproducing the agent’s ‘hand’ would have been invaluable. This alone can account for Cruciform’s work in this area. [2]

Crooked Mick’s main role was to carry pianos into positions where they could be easily captured by the Germans, but once a few of the pianos had been transferred to German control, it became easier simply to allow the rolls of paper to fall into German hands.

---

[1]        Dennis Condon (pers. comm.)

[2]        The notion that the “radio-Ampico” was part of a complicated diabolical assassination machine, designed to kill anybody sitting during the German national anthem (i.e., the Kaiser) is, of course, too ludicrous for words. Those aware of the literature on Cruciform will already know, of course, that this is another De Choncqui theory.

Wayfaring with fossils.

I have been writing a piece this weekend for younger readers. It's about how geology is everywhere, and I'll probably post it here as well, at some stage, but in the end, I decided not to discuss fossils, but to refer them to this blog, because, as a quick click on the fossils tag below will reveal, fossils are one of my longest-lasting temporary obsessions in and among these pages.

In particular, I decided to refer them to my tale of smuggling a fossil out of Britain. There was no crime in this, but for good and valid scientific reasons, I needed to hoodwink an idiot. When I looked, though, I realised that I have never told that story here, nor is it in my Australian Backyard Earth Scientist.

It is, however, in my Mistaken for Granite, and now, finally, it's here.

Ammonite, Morocco.

Fossils were once anything that was found buried, including archaeological material, and this confusion lives on in some quarters, as this true tale will reveal.

In 1993, I was working for the Australian Museum as an educator, but I had been seconded to an aid project in the Pacific (training science teachers), and I brought home a pickled Giant African Land Snail.

Knowing these snails ought to be a dubious import into Oz, I declared it, outlined the preservation methods used to ensure that it was sincerely dead, explained that it was destined to reside in the Australian Museum, and I was told “You know more about this than I do. Take it.”

Clearly, I had pre-empted the argument phase, but equally clearly, I act honestly. That had to change in late April that same year, when I was forced to get an export safely out of Britain.

A colleague at the museum, knowing I would be in Edinburgh, had asked me to courier home a type specimen of a Devonian fish that he had lodged with the Royal Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh some years earlier.

I agreed, took the right letters to effect the loan, collected the fossil in bubble wrap and cardboard and set off, with the appropriate documents saying what it was, and that it was a proper and legitimate loan.

All was well until I arrived at Heathrow on my way out. As I had all the papers, and worried that there might be questions if I did not show what I had, I declared the fish. The customs officer spoke impeccable English but let us just say that he was clearly of non-British parentage and culture. “You can’t take that,” he said.

I asked why not. “You don’t have the appropriate EU documentation, and you are stealing our heritage.” Now I might have said, “Mate, this is a Scottish fish, I’m a genetic Scot, and it’s being loaned by a Scottish museum to a Scot in Australia—and he found it in the first place—and you're no Scot. So just whose heritage are we talking about?”

I didn’t, because that is not my way. I could see the surreal aspect, but I was diplomatic. It availed me nothing. He still demanded that I surrender the object as yet uninspected, which lay in my carry-on bag. I argued, and explained that it was one of a kind. It was a type specimen, and special to science. He produced an alphabetical list of sciences on a sheet of paper. “Is this archaeology or zoology?”

“Neither,” I said. “It comes under palaeontology.”

He bristled, sensing that I was being smart or worse, and scrutinised his sheet of paper. Because I’m good at reading upside-down, I pointed to the word he was seeking. “It means ‘study of fossils’,” I said.

I had, however, recognised that this gentleman, for all that he was polite, well-informed on paperwork and probably well-meaning, was either untrained or as thick as two bricks—or both. I concluded that this was not somebody who could be trusted to look after a type specimen and treat it with due care.

A type specimen is very special to scientists: it is the original specimen from which a name was given. My colleague had found this fossil, described it and named it, but now it needed some further study, which is why he was borrowing it.

I had, in the same bag, a piece of partly metamorphosed shale from Wales, wrapped in newspaper, so as I was arguing, I brought that to the top of the bag. It was, after all, of no real value to me. Let me emphasise that I did not, at any time, imply that this was the fossil because I am, after all, a totally honest man. I spoke no lie. I cannot reasonably be held to account for the wild conclusions made by the Great Unwashed of Britain.

His hand darted out, seized the package, and tipped the stone out of the protective wrapping so it landed with a bang onto the counter (confirming my assessment of him), turned it over, dug at it with a grubby thumbnail (further confirmation), then handed it back. “I suppose you can take it,” he told me, somewhat reluctantly.

I thanked him nicely, wrapped the Welsh shale again, placed it protectively over the fossil fish in its bubble wrap, and walked off.

I said nothing until I was home, when I told an edited version of this story in a British weekly, New Scientist, as part of a discussion on rare fossils being sent through the mail, the risks they were put under, and the need to have customs officers examine them. The officers needed to be educated first, I said.

My colleague examined the fossil fish as necessary, and it was later couriered safely back to Edinburgh, though not by me. I was lying low, and having outed myself, I have avoided Heathrow ever since, because they may still be waiting for me.