Giftological and giftophysical goodness

The giving season cometh — are you angling for a lump of coal again? Coal balls — for the geologist who has been extra good this year. How do you measure geological goodness anyway? Number of samples taken maybe, or papers written, talks presented, blog posts posted, students instructed, children impressed with the volcano–earthquake–dinosaur trifecta.

If you're looking for things to light up a geo-nerd you care for, here are some ideas.

Comestibles

• Single malt whisky comes from Scotland, like water, rocks, and tough folk. What could be more geoloigcal? Don't know where to start? Look out for Bruichladdich ROCKS.
• The SoCal Beer Company brews a nice-looking Seismic IPA but <cry> I can't find a shipper.
• There's always chocolate pebbles, or Brighton Rock.

Gadgets

• It's not just geophysics nerds that need a Quake Catcher Network seismometer.
• I read a blog post by @alandpitts about his USB microscope and now I want one too, only $110 for now.
• The Lytro is the must-have camera for 2012 (at least until the ball camera comes out)... full lightfield imaging lets you focus later. Totally amazing—physics in action!
• There are some passionate GigaPanners in the geology world, capturing outcrops with a billion pixels. All you need is your camera and a GigaPan mount. 

T-shirts

• Geological T-shirts can get a bit lame and heavy on the puns, but some of Geoshirt.de's are wicked. And German. Achtung!
• If you're into microfossils, check out this diatomically correct shirt.
• And there's always ThinkGeek, especially this heavy metal shirt.

If the geos you know just like to read, keep them quiet with our reading list. If you're still stuck, there are lots more ideas in last year's giftology post — that Triceratops is still for sale!

Rock sweets image from flickr user su-lin and licensed CC-BY-NC-ND. Low-res T-shirt image considered fair use. 

Update on 2011-12-03 15:30 by Matt Hall

Don't miss Evelyn Mervine's geo-Christmas gifts post at Georneys.

In reponse to Evelyn's post, Tony Martin tweeted about another geological beer, Pangaea.