Pyrite for Dummies

Pyrite cube

As they wander the back roads of the internet, the Antisocial Network staffers are often amazed, though not necessarily amused, by some of the ridiculous rubbish people spew. We're not even talking about the unceasing river of stupidity flowing through social media sites; we rarely bother with those. No, we generally confine our search for dummies to those places where hack writers try to make money off advertising and referrals (an increasingly difficult task as google gets wise to content farms and keyword stuffing). Once in a while, we come across a veritable jewel in the rough... or, to be more precise, a bit of extra rough in the rough; where someone says something really, really stupid while trying to be "smart." Today's example is a veritable fount of misinformation whose scribbling can be found at PersonaPaper.com, Vince Summers; here caught in the midst of misinforming his readership in a post he called "My Virginia Find - Devil's Dice."¹

It seems the Summers was on the grounds of his "house of worship" (what: PersonaPaper has a minimum word count, too? he couldn't just say "church"?) when he found some brown cubes in the dirt. Summers goes on to say,

"What were these small cubes, about the size of ordinary gaming dice?

Well, although they were brown, they were basically fool's gold. The outer crust was oxidized by the air and moisture, producing a skin mineral called gadolinite."

"Basically fool's gold"? Were they pyrite or not, Vince? Our staff geologist is quite familiar with little cube-shaped crystals of pyrite, a rather common mineral whose chemical composition is iron sulfide (FeS2). Since Vince found them loose in the soil, it's most likely that these little crystals grew within a sedimentary setting with a reducing environment such as a lagoon or swamp. Such crystals are known from pretty much around the world; our geologist has a bag of them somewhere that he collected in the mountains of southern Arizona. The name "devil's dice" is a new one on him, that – though it doesn't appear in the Dictionary of American Regional English – seems quite apropos. What isn't apropos, however, is the identification of the "skin mineral" as gadolinite. First, a google search on "skin mineral" turned up only innumerable references to makeup and, somewhere near the end of the results, to dermatology and hard water. It's fairly obvious, however, that he meant "coating" or "rind" -- he just didn't know it.

What is utterly stupefying, however, is the identification of this mineral coating as gadolinite, a quite rare mineral. The silicate gadolinite, which is black (not brown) has a highly variable chemical composition containing varying amounts of cerium, lanthanum, neodymium, beryllium, yttrium and iron with its silicon and oxygen. Oddly, it contains no gadolinium... It's an igneous mineral as well, which means it couldn't form by oxidization on a pyrite crystal in the near-surface environment. The brown coating is simple rust; known to mineralogists as limonite (iron oxide) or goethite (hydrated iron oxide). Where Summers came up with gadolinite is a complete mystery, but if he were correct he shouldn't be carrying the "dice" around: their lanthanum content makes them faintly radioactive

More of Summers:

"After just a short while, I found a huge rock that was cuboid in shape, about, oh, 1-1/2" by 1-1/2" by 4-1/2" in length. I figured it was gold! But it was brown. Well, I tried smacking it and it shattered! It was not gold, but fool's gold. Yes, it was an exaggeratedly large Devil's dice. I was sad I'd ruined it. You see, later, I was to see an exemplary specimen at the University of Virginia, that WAS SMALLER THAN MY PIECE. I've felt bad, ever since. I'd destroyed a true treasure"

Ahem:

1. You call 1½ by 1½ by 4½ inches "huge"? we wouldn't – we probably wouldn't call it "cuboid," either, since that's not an adjective.
2. Just in case you didn't know, Vince, in mineral collections size is only one of the factors that define an "exemplary specimen." 

For clearly faking it, for making up some terms and misusing others, and -- most of all -- for gross misinformation, we hereby award Vince Summers today's Dumbass of the Day. Hell, we'd have given it to him even if he had correctly identified fool's gold as pyrite -- but he didn't.

¹ Summers deleted this and rewrote it at another site, in the process correcting some of his bull. We wonder if he read this and was ashamed? 

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SI - MINERALS