Tuesday, September 23, 2025

planet aqua

It's strange that we are calling our planet "Earth" as there isn't all that much earth around here. There's a metal core, some rocky stuff around it, and just a very thin layer of earth covering less than a third of the surface. So, looking at it from the outside, it makes sense to call it Planet Aqua instead, and to write a book about how the history of civilisations is really about managing the flow of all that water, and how due to the climate catastrophe which we have caused, we are now losing that control over the hydrosphere. Which Jeremy Rifkin has done:

Planet Aqua: Rethinking our home in the Universe
by Jeremy Rifkin
Polity Press 2024
My long essay review of the book is now out in the September issue of C&I:

Go with the flow

Chemistry & Industry Volume 89, Issue 9, September 2025, Page 34

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I can send a PDF on request.

Monday, September 22, 2025

fake news in nature

Living organisms communicate on many different channels, from chemical signalling to ultrasound, and wherever researchers look they find that these means of communication can also be used to deceive and spread fake news. A recent paper on deceptive pheromone signals in mantises luring the hopeful male partners to their death inspired me to have a deeper look at various kinds of natural deception that were discovered recently.

My feature is out now:

Deception on all channels

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 18, 22 September 2025, Pages R865-R867

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

In the springbok mantis Miomantis caffra, hungry females use dishonest pheromone signalling to attract males, which they then consume. (Photo: Bernard Dupont/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

Sunday, September 14, 2025

a callipygian book

Some thoughts on

Museum bums: A cheeky looks at butts in art
Mark Small and Jack Shoulder
Chronicle Books 2023

Back in the good old days of twitter, I used to follow @museumbums for a daily dose of cheeky art, but now our ways have parted as they're on bluesky and apparently haven't bridged to Mastodon (yet). Hence it made my day when I accidentally discovered their book in charity shop and I mainly bought it as a souvenir to remind me of the happy days of twitter.

Turns out, however, that the cheeky text accomppanying the callipygian photos is very educational too, so I gave the book a proper reading. In the process I learned that callipygian means "with a beautiful bum" - I don't know how I missed that before, that's what you get for not having Ancient Greek at school. I will now use this word at every opportunity to make up for lost time.

The authors are proper museum bums, sorry, experts, who know their art history from the bottom up, and they manage to tie it in with today's social concerns in a highly entertaining way, bringing up all the inherent biases and prejudices in the Western art canon without ever losing the fun side out of view.

Now if only they could bridge their account to Mastodon, I could continue to educate myself every day ...

PS I hear they may be doing wall calendars as well - will look out for that!

ukbookshop.org

Saturday, September 13, 2025

paint it black

Pirate Luthier update

After a month without new arrivals, I found two violins to rescue at the antiques fair on Gloucester Green on the same day, within five minutes in fact. The first one, number 28 in my books, is a cool shiny black. It isn't branded at all, but looking online I see companies like Gear4music selling similar ones in black or other colours.

As I found it (and bought it for £25) it looked completely new, just had a couple of dents in the fingerboard and in the outside of the case, probably due to inadequate storage or transport arrangements. I would suggest that it has never been played, because it wasn't playable and hadn't been set up properly. The bridge was almost raw, so I had to cut that to the right shape and size. Then the pegs were all sticking to an extent that made tuning impossible. Once I fixed that with peg paste, they slid deeper into the holes meaning that in two pegs the holes for the strings disappeared in the sides of the scroll because they were clearly in the wrong places. So I had a couple of extra holes to drill and then everything worked ok.

After setting everything up, I was left with one problem that I can't fix: The fingerboard is slightly out of kilter with the straight line from the scroll to the tailpin. Once the strings are tuned up, the physics of the considerable pull forces doesn't lie - it chooses the shortest path, and that isn't quite where the fingerboard is attached. While this misalignment could in theory be due to the tailpin being in the wrong place, I checked by pressing a ruler to the sides of the fingerboard to extrapolate its direction. It is a good 5 mm off (to the E side) with respect to the F-holes. So the instrument looks a bit lop-sided but it is playable now. I'd even say it sounds quite nice for a cheap factory fiddle with obvious manufacturing flaws. Nice and warm sound in the lower register, nothing boxy about it. So whatever is hidden under the black paint, it isn't a cigar box.

Oh, and we have a new rug ...

List of violins in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). I bought it very cheap on gumtree, mainly because I needed a case for number 1). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) was my second favourite and the one I played in folk sessions for roughly a year until number 22) showed up.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 10) is the 3/4 sized one with a broken neck and traces of multiple repair attempts, which I've now repaired. I kept it for a couple of months to check the neck stays in place, then gave it away to a good cause in June 2025.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in June 2024.

violin 13) is still broken

violin 14) is a half-size Lark which I gave away to a good cause in June 2025.

violin 15) is a 3/4 size Stentor student 2, which I gave away to a local school in October 2024

violin 16) is the Sebastian Klotz branded one, sadly not made by the Mittenwald luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name.

violin 17) is the supersized violin with a very strong sound.

violin 18) is the slightly drunken but nice sounding violin from Poland, which I restored and returned to its family.

violin 19) is a Stentor student 1 violin which only needed a little TLC, and within less than a week I had it brushed up and ready to move to our local school. The most intriguing problem it had was that somebody had put in the bridge the wrong way round, with the lower slope under the G string.

violin 20) is a Stentor student 1 violin I bought via GumTree. It sounds really nice for what it is, thanks in part to a good set-up with Dominant strings. My current plan is to make this one an official Cowley Orchestra instrument.

violin 21) is a nameless student violin I bought via facebook, not quite sure what to think of it. The fingerboard is horizontal, which is all wrong and may mean there is not enough pressure on the bridge to produce a good sound.

violin 22) is the 19th century Guarneri copy, still my favourite (although I'll have to fix that crack at some point).

violin 23) is a nameless student violin I bought from a charity shop. It looks unused but had no strings, so I set it up with a set of spare strings that came with another violin. It turned out to be no trouble at all and sounds ok for an instrument that looks really cheap (with the purfling painted on).

violin 24) is the densely cratered one I found lying on a chair at Oxfam, and which I currently play at sessions.

violin 25) is the fleamarket find from Neuss

violin 26) is the lady in red, which has now rejoined its family.

violin 27) is the Czechoslovakian student model

violin 28) is the black one described above

violin 29) is an interesting old 7/8 size instrument which I'll feature in the next entry.

Balance 13.9.2025:
Of the 29 violins listed above, 8 received via freegle, 3 from friends and family, 16 bought (gumtree, facebook, charity shops, flea markets, cost ranging £ 10 to £45), 2 taken in for repair only and returned to their families.
Of the 27 acquired, 8 given away via freegle, 2 given to a local school, 2 sold to musical friends, 1 moved to Germany for holiday practice, 11 currently in house and ready to play, 1 in house and just needs setting up, 2 in house and still broken.

List of other instruments in the pirate luthier series:

an old Irish banjo

guitar 1) is the 100 year-old one from Valencia which I set up with frets and strings and handed back to its owner.

guitar 2) is one I spotted in a charity shop "sold as seen" for a very affordable price with nothing more than a broken string, and I bought and repaired it because I knew the owner of the next one needed one while their guitar was out of service.

guitar 3) had a broken neck which I glued back on with hide glue at the same time when I repaired violin 10). It has now returned to its family.

the zither I found at the flea market in Dusseldorf.

and finally a shout-out to our family-built hammered dulcimer, which dates from 2016, long before I got any ideas about violins.

Monday, September 08, 2025

on the origins of alcohol consumption

A recent news release about researchers recycling an ancient word, namely scrumping, drew my attention to the issue of apes and other animals seeking out fermenting fruit that likely contain alcohol. Historically, alcohol appreciation in animals has been dismissed as accidental or anecdotal, but recent investigations seem to suggest there are good reasons for animals to seek fermenting fruit, and thus consumption of some amounts of alcohol may be more widespread than previously thought. It turns out in fact that we share our remarkable ability to digest alcohol with the African great apes, so it is older than our species.

My feature is out now:

Apes appreciate alcohol

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 17, 8 September 2025, Pages R819-R821

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

Update 18.9.2025: The alcohol uptake of chimps has now been quantified reports the Guardian based on a paper in Science Advances.

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

Fruit flies of the Drosophila genus are well adapted to the presence of ethanol in decaying fruit and can even tolerate a limited amount of methanol. (Photo: Martin Cooper/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

Friday, September 05, 2025

in statu nascendi

This month's issue of Nachrichten aus der Chemie is a special issue on science communication and for the occasion I was asked to observe myself during my writing process and do a piece about how I write. I guess for the future AI apocalypse and beyond this may turn out to be an archaeologically relevant thing as evidence that in the early 21s century humans were still able to write stuff.

Anyhow. I followed the process of my writing the feature on migrations and movements across the ancient Mediterranean, which appeared in Current Biology in July. I called the meta-piece "in statu nascendi" which of course is chemical lingo (and Latin) for something in the process of being born, but the journal chose the title:

Vom Gedanken zur Geschichte (From the thought to the story)

which is also nice, especially in its emphasis on thought, which may soon disappear ...

This appears on page of the September issue, so the citation is

Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2025, 73, issue 9, 74-76.

At the back of the same issue I also have one of my tongue in cheek columns, this time making fun of the epidemic of tripartite titles. The main publisher of my German books used these a lot, and I found many of them annoying, but a recent investigation of citations of published papers seems to suggest these titles work. So that fits in with the communications special as well, in a tongue-in-cheek way. The title is also tripartite (and alliterated) of course:

Titel, Thesen, Tintenkleckse

Nachrichten aus der Chemie 2025, 73, issue 9, 112.

Cover of the magazine Nachrichten aus der Chemie September 2025, showing a drawing of a person speaking into a megaphone

PS I haven't been very good at tracking my publications in German either here or on the website, but there should be around 10-12 each year in Nachrichten, half and half of the serious and not so serious type. This communications special piece was out of the normal sequence.

Thursday, September 04, 2025

27 missing movies

Films not shown, special edition

After seeing Oxana at the cinema, I also watched the documentary I am Femen on YouTube (in Germany, it doesn't seem to work in the UK). After that the youtube bots launched an effort to show me all sorts of former Soviet Union / Eastern European films with age restriction, so I am trying to keep track of the interesting things and new countries I am discovering here. (Films from 2021 onwards I will also add to Films not shown.)

Losing innocence in Alma Ata (Теряя невинность в Алма-Ате) - Kazakhstan 2010. The first Kazakh film I've ever seen, though most of the dialogue is in Russian. From female director Zhanna Issabayeva (Жанна Исабаева) this is a collection of 13 stories on sexual beginnings, all very cute and also educational, as I knew nothing about that part of the world.

Metronom - slightly troubling Romanian film from 2022 (also added to my films not shown list for the 2020s) about teenagers in 1970s Bucharest discovering Western pop music and getting in trouble for it. I watched it on this YouTube channel, which specialises on Romanian films.

School of Senses - Érzékek iskolája Hungarian film from 1996, the colours look more like 1980s to me, which would put me off normally, but it does have visual poetry and a very watchable female lead (never mind the horrid bloke).

Лето, или 27 потерянных поцелуев (27 missing kisses) - Georgia 2000, Nana Dzhordzhadze, starring Nutsa Kukhianidze Released in Germany in June 2001 but not in the UK. Here is a version dubbed in German which I don't normally approve of but Georgian is really a language I know nothing about! (Apparently, as I just found out, it is part of the Kartvelian family which has no known relation to any other language family.)

The film may well be my favourite in this list so far. The protagonist is a blatant manic pixie dream girl, but the setting in post-Soviet Georgia offers striking visuals from the crumbling factory to the derelict ship and the old village with its rarely used cinema, so there's plenty of cinematic interest even if you have seen too many manic pixies in your life. Watch out for Pierre Richard.

A few days after watching the German copy, I watched it again in the Russian version (with the original soundtrack but the Georgian and French dialogue overdubbed) which revealed that our manic pixie speaks Georgian to her young friend but Russian to most other people and to herself. (The first version which Youtube found for me was dubbed into Czech, so I've now put the Russian version at the top, as it's the closest to the original version I could find.)

I learned that manic pixies always leave and enter the house through the windows, preferably in their night gown.

As this entry goes live, I am still discovering new stuff in this rabbit hole, so watch this space (although I may not reach the 27 movies of the title). Last updated 22.9.2025

The ones I watched after the post

45m2 - Greece, 2010, Stratos Tzitzis - does Greece count as Eastern Europe? Another dreamy pixie is hit by the economic fallout of the Greek financial crisis. Fittingly, this is a low budget chamber piece, much of which is filmed in the flat of the title.

Some that I haven't watched yet:

Козият рог (The Goat horn), Bulgaria 1994.

Plemya - Ukraine 2014 - a film entirely in Ukrainian sign language ...

Do svidaniya mama - Russia 2014, Svetlana Proskurina

Bonded parallels - Armenia 2009, Hovhannes Galstyan

Intimnuye mesta (Intimate parts) - Russia 2013, Natasha Merkulova / Alexey Chupov

the algorithms also came up with one movie I've actually seen when it was new:

Rouge baiser (1995) (where the rouge is an allusion to communist activities).