(NB: I’ve skipped over songs where the first line contains the title, songs in languages I can’t order beer in, and exceptionally mumbledy singer-songwriters.)
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1. Nothingness
2. Trick question! The universe never ends
3. God
   Mr. McMoots added a fourth:

4. Trick question! The universe never existed at all

Lazyweb, has that last one ever been done? For values of “universe” and “exist” that require an impressive degree of ontological contortion?

Non-LJ users, please ignore this message.

Please update your bookmarks, links and feed subscriptions! My new URL is http://scienceblogs.com/greengabbro, and the new feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceblogs/GreenGabbro.

Greengabbro.net isn’t going anywhere - I like having it as a repository for personal projects, and besides, I just renewed the domain for 2 more years. I’ll keep blogging here, too, whenever inspiration strikes for a post that wouldn’t be of interest to the audience at ScienceBlogs - it won’t be often, but it’ll be more often than “never”. So if you’re interested in my intense hatred of particular food products or updates to my WordPress plugins, by all means keep checking in here now and then.

If you’re interested in my thoughts on geology, the culture of science, or pie, though, you’ll need to follow me on over to ScienceBlogs. See y’all there!

Below the fold: I’ve been tagged! This meme is about writing. Also, it only requires you to list three things, which I think is probably the maximum number of things that should be in a meme. Otherwise it’s almost as much work as writing something original.
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• Diamonds are not made from coal - With either [melt catalyst belt or chemical vapor deposition], nitrogen from organic compounds in the coal would impart a yellow-green color in the diamond due to the absorption of the single N defect. I assume this also holds for the Superman method.
• Axial tilt is the reason for the season.
• Santa Claus is, at best, a metaphor.
• Dinosaurs aren’t dead - In fact there are some rather bewildered-looking avian dinosaurs outside my kitchen window wondering how Bubba the Fat Squirrel managed to steal the fat balls from 1.5m high up on our dispenser.
• Earth’s mantle isn’t molten. No, really, it isn’t. Mantle flow doesn’t drive plate tectonics, either. But the mantle is 3D. In fact, most things are 3D… except, of course, gorgeous illustrations by William Smith.
• Small earthquakes don’t do anything to prevent bigger earthquakes. You see, each magnitude 4 earthquake releases about 30 times as much energy as a magnitude 3… but an odd fact of seismology is that the ratio of M3:M4 earthquakes is constant over time, at about 10:1. This leaves us with a factor of 20 lurking ominously in the shadows.
• California is not going to fall into the sea. No, really, it isn’t.
• The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is neither relevant nor funny at the macro scale.
• Crustal folding doesn’t always mean a thickened crust - though the crust in that counterexample can still be fairly described as “thickening”.
• Lava is not a swimming pool. Oh, and the mantle isn’t liquid.
• The mantle is the most annoyingly least-understood part of this planet.

In other news, Mel discusses a test designed to expose students’ geological misconceptions - and why it might not always work. Saxifraga talks about what glaciers actually do - “The moraine five kilometers in front of the modern glacier margin is not a sad sign of the ice retreat, but a sign of a not climate related natural phenomenon called glacier surge and the retreat from the Little Ice Age moraine is partly an adaptation to warming over the past 100 years.”

In honor of National Pie Day, Callan Bentley shares his favorite baked-goods teaching analogies - but he hasn’t thought of any pielike concepts in geology, maybe you can help? Brian objects to the “layer cake” analogy, suggesting that perhaps we should use lentils instead. Lentils? I guess I’ve seen recipes for lentil shepherd’s pie…

Finally, Lab Lemming has a delicious rocky planet pie chart, and by “delicious” I mean “my dentist told me only to eat gas giant pie charts”.

Submit posts by leaving a comment here, or email me at criminy.crickets [at] gmail.

• Adding water makes serpentinite plus some other junk
• Many major metamorphic facies are conveniently named after rocks formed by sending a chunk of mafic material down to particular temperatures and pressures:
  • amphibolite
  • greenschist
  • blueschist
  • granulite
  • eclogite

But I don’t know that any of these things make particularly good puns. Hmm.

Presto climatto, sunny weather on the farm, with just enough nice puffy cumulus clouds in the sky to find animals in.

Image source: MODIS/AQUA, published as Figure 2 of Kawase, H., T. Yoshikane, M. Hara, F. Kimura, T. Sato, and S. Ohsawa (2008), Impact of extensive irrigation on the formation of cumulus clouds, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L01806, doi:10.1029/2007GL032435. Kawase et al. worked out a numerical model which reproduces this effect. Go them.