Trump Quits Iran Deal. Mosses, Sound Recorder's Corner of Hell and Remembering Alfred Russel Wallace

Eros at Piccadilly Circus

President Trump held to his promise and declared his intention to withdraw the US from the Iran deal. He has ignored his allies and has demonstrated that the president is capable of making decision in straight contradiction to the advice he has received.

Everyone else thinks that whilst the agreement with Iran is not perfect, the nuclear controls have been effective.

POTUS also signed a reintroduction of hard sanctions against Iran. This could create difficulties for the other countries of the EU, Russia and China who wish to continue trading with Iran and thus uphold the security arrangement with Iran.

At least Boris still has a job despite the double whammy of not being able to convince the President to stick with the Iran Deal and brazenly calling his Prime Ministers plans for a customs partership 'crazy'. The Government is still frozen on Brexit.

We had a minor miracle today. A plumber had not only said he would come between 8:30 and 9am this morning, he actually appeared and repaired our rather dramatically leaking bathroom cold tap within half an hour.

I took the train to London this afternoon, for the annual Presidential address of the Quekett Microscopical Club. It was held at the Linnaean Society of London, in the very room where Charles Darwin's and Alfred Russel Wallace's ideas on evolution where presented.

President Joan Bingley talked on the Joy of Bryophytes - mosses and liverworts to you and me. Often ignored because they don't have visible pretty flowers, their small structures can  be beautiful at the microscopic scale. They also fulfill vital functions, providing homes for numerous small organisms, including the small and strangely cute tardigrades or water bears. What most people do not know is that a significant amount of carbon in the UK is actually captured out of the atmosphere and stored in sphagnum moss peat bogs and peat deposits.

I was filming the talk and was reminded of the fact that, if there is a  hell, there is one corner specifically reserved for members of the audience who come in late, leave the sound on their smartphones to ping as they surreptitiously send and receive messages; who manage to create those rustly noises when attempting the impossible task of opening a pack of sweets quietly; all that close to the recording camera. Hopefully the separate microphone at the front of the room was sufficiently far away not to be contaminated by the distractions.

Sound recording cropped up again on the train journey home when chatting to a fellow traveler. He specialised in creating podcasts of talks at his local history group, something we have done at the Milton Local History Group. He too was familiar with Alfred Russel Wallace and his work on the Malay and Indonesian archipelago, though for a time we both struggled to remember his name, something gradually being rectified in accounts of the history of Biology.