That's why I go on beer tours with Helen - it's purely the status boost of hanging out with an expert.

And I'd like a pink pony.

Meanwhile in the real world, expertise is measured almost exclusively by media noise - at the big media scale, and also at the small science scale, where you can talk crap and still be published in peer reviewed papers, and you can have some original ideas which never make it past peer review.

So what is an expert, exactly? And how can you tell the difference (if you're not a chicken)?