Bob Gooday

@bobgooday.bsky.social

837 Followers 618 Following

Geological Analyst for National Museums Scotland. Minerals, microscopes, maps, mountains, music.

A group of geologists crowd round a fallen block of rock on a grassy and rocky slope by the sea. Behind them is a large cliff showing columnar jointing. Nice day for it.
Screenshot from the NYT Crossword app showing 500-day streak.
My unconformity cake. Vertical slices of chocolate cake topped with a horizontal vanilla sponge. All covered with buttercream icing and imbricated strawberries.
Four geologists sitting on a sofa in front of a spread of coffee and cake. One cake has candles spelling 300. Behind them is a portrait of James Hutton with a party hat and tooter, and a Happy Birthday banner.
My results of the quiz. Eco-Socialist.
A screengrab from the video showing the silhouette of, I presume, Heathcliff and older Cathy.
Google's AI overview calling it a volcanic plug.
Microscope image of Ailsa Craig Common Green microgranite thin section. Mostly quartz and cloudy feldspar with patches and clots of very dark green and brown minerals infilling gaps.
A burns supper laid out with haggis, neeps and tatties, green beans, ketchup, wine and whisky. A book of poetry is laid open at the address to a haggis.
An old sign next to a road in a wintery birch forest. It's damaged but clearly prohibits bathing, littering etc. Last line says "do not throw coins into the loch". The modern Scottish Water sign has blown off and lies nearby.
Thin section of peridotite between crossed polars. Mostly small rounded olivines and interstitial pyroxene with bright second-order birefringence colours, with minor plagioclase and some tiny black opaques, probably chromite.
Screenshot of the NYT Games app with a dialogue box asking me to update the app with no option other than Update Now.
Some small prismatic crystals displaying bright birefringence colours against a black background. They are smaller than the 0.5 millimetre scale bar.
An unfinished tile hearth beneath a large wooden mantelpiece covered in Christmas decorations. There are tools and bits of tile lying on the floor.
My Spotify wrapped top five genres. 1 metal. 2 bluegrass. 3 liquid funk. 4 stoner rock. 5 country.
Archaeologists are to resume digging at the Ness of Brodgar on Orkney after 3D radar technology led to and "extraordinary discovery". The dig team at the Ness, one of the most important Neolithic sites in the British Isles, are not revealing what they believe the find to be until more work is done.
Two symmetrical slabs of rock showing a dark grey host intruded by a coarse pale brown granite.
The rocky and grassy beach with the Firth of Clyde in the background. In the foreground a red slab of rock is engraved with “Hutton’s Unconformity”.
A copy of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House sitting on a table next to a cup of tea. The cover depicts a reflection of a silhouette of a person in a shallow pool, arms outstretched and upside down from the observer’s point of view. Creepy!
An array of four seasonal squashes and root vegetables. Three have spooky faces carved into them and have candles inside.
Chart from Our World in Data showing coal production steadily increasing, largely led by China.
xkcd comic number 2827. Speech bubble: Did you know the mighty redwood is actually the same species as broccoli and kale? It's just a different cultivar. Wow! Caption: Every year or two, botanists add another plant to Brassica oleracea and see if anyone calls them on it.
A hardcover book called Volcanoes 10 things you should know – unearth the fascinating fundamentals of volcanoes, by Dr Rebecca Williams. It has a deep red cover with an image of an erupting volcano in embossed gold.
Colour: Emerald-green, grass-green, leek green, siskin green, apple green. Lustre: Sub-adamantine, Vitreous, Waxy, Pearly Hardness: 2 - 2.5
A grassy and rocky landscape with a geologist walking towards the camera. In the background is a white sandy beach and blue bay.
A passage about the Stac Fada member. The sentence about the sequence possibly being repeated is repeated.
A screenshot of two consecutive skeets. The upper one shows the ginger cat wandering around OP's house. The second one shows Adonis the ginger cat sniffing neighbours' shoes outside his own house.
A hill in a city with a large wildfire raging through the vegetation. Red-roofed primary school in foreground.
A ginger cat sitting in a claw foot bath.
A photo of a cricket match from the stands.
Two men performing on a stage in a festival marquee. One is playing acoustic guitar and the other is playing mandolin. Both have baseball caps and moustaches.
A tweet from Hugh Brechin from 2022 which reads “it’s a great bit that Keir Starmer, a man who genuinely loves football, manages whenever he posts about it to come across like he had never heard of it before reading the Wikipedia page this morning”.
A pink axolotl with pink gills and beady black eyes sitting on top of a log in an aquarium surrounded by plants.
A grubby uncovered wooden floor in a renovation house, with a large channel running parallel to the boards.
A screenshot from NYT puzzle app. Congratulations! You finished a Thursday puzzle in 1:03:17. 121 day streak. 33:30 slower than your average.
Picture of a wall that has had the wallpaper stripped off with a ladder against it. Two cracks with an angle of around thirty degrees cut through the old plaster. The wall is pink below a yellow line at picture rail height, and beige above.
Pallot told the court: “It’s said there is no such thing as the perfect crime. There’s no such thing as the perfect fake either. We could have done better. We’re not good forgets. We didn’t make the wood retract.”
Screenshot from the NYT crossword app. Congratulations, you finished a Thursday puzzle in 27:15. 100 day streak. 2:03 faster than your average.
A woman standing on top of a mountain between a cairn and trig point. She is looking out over Loch Lomond below and Ben Lomond in the distance.
A can of beer next to a glass full of a very dark drink on a kitchen counter. The beer is a Vault City crème egg imperial stout. It is 14% abv. I’ll level with you, it’s more conceptually impressive than actually nice.
Tweet from David Hughes from 2015. Judas: still on for Friday? Jesus: Friday? Judas: yeah, the last supper. Jesus: the what? Judas: supper. Normal supper with the fellas. The original poster is probably confusing the day of the last supper with Good Friday, as it is generally accepted to have occurred on Maundy Thursday.
Thin section between crossed polars of a coarse gabbro on the right showing black and white feldspars and colourful pyroxenes, and a much finer dolerite on the left with the same minerals but smaller.
Photo of the grand gallery at the National Museum of Scotland, a classic Victorian atrium with iron columns and railings and a glass roof.
A screenshot from the NYT games app showing the calendar for March with a gold star on every day.
Thin section photo, plane polarised on the left and between crossed polars on the right. It shows fayalite which is pale green and rusty in PPL and has colourful birefringence in XP. The groundmass is colourless quartz and feldspar which show a strange intergrowth in patches.
A photo showing a corner of a stairwell where to bits of green MDF dado rail meet at a crazy angle. Bare grey plaster above and unpainted pine panelling below.
Just one of the best thin section images you're likely to see. Brightly coloured fresh olivines in blues, yellows, and oranges among smaller black, white and grey plagioclases, which generally define a fabric from left to right.
Photomicrograph in crossed polars showing a fine grained igneous rock absolutely full of colourful olivine crystals in pink, green, yellow, and blue.
A half pint of pale beer sitting on a wooden bar. A busy pub with six nations flags hanging up is visible in the background.
A photomicrograph of a basalt between crossed polars. It is full of large colourful clinopyroxenes, some round grey vesicles, and some yellowy grey altered olivines. The groundmass is full of little plagioclase feldspars and iron oxides.
Google AI overview stating that it is illegal to hunt wild haggis in Scotland.
Two weight plates on a barbell, photographed at an angle where the upper one is blue and the lower one is yellow, like the Ukrainian flag.
A screenshot of a tweet from 2021. Greeting the great plumed serpent god Quetzalcoatl as he is coming into the pub. Quetzyyyy! spelled with four Ys.
A thin section photomicrograph of an andesite between crossed polars, showing white elongate feldspar phenocrysts, brightly coloured clinopyroxenes, and lots of tiny black iron oxides.
Two freshly baked round boule loaves of bread. They have a spiral pattern and distinctive ear on their top crusts. One has been sliced open to show the big holes in the crumb. A block of butter and a bread knife are also on the board.
A small black synthesizer with silver knobs, light-up sequencer buttons, a black and white keyboard, and wooden side panels. It is sitting on a desk next to some other electronic music gear.
Two pale yellow and foamy cocktails in whisky tumblers. They are sitting on a table next to a bottle of Ardmore single malt and a small bottle of Bob’s bitters.
A bloomer of freshly baked bread sitting on a wire rack on a kitchen surface.
A surface pressure meteorological chart for the North Atlantic and Europe, showing a very tightly spiralling depression centred over northern Scotland.
A photomicrograph of a thin section of rock in plane-polarised light. It is foliated from top to bottom with bands of greyish-green augite and white quartz and feldspar. A few pale pinkish garnets are surrounded by coronae of quartz and feldspar.