(no subject)
So, I just finished reading Bones, Rocks, and Stars by Chris Turney. Not long ago, PZ Myers strongly endorsed it on his blog, so I checked it out.
I probably read it too quickly to be able to internalize the information and be able to effectively represent it in conversation, so maybe I should read or skim it again sometime. But not now. Too much homework to do.
Anyway, holy CRAP have the last 300 years been super productive, science-wise. Bones, Rocks, and Stars is a series of pithy accounts of the investigations that revealed the big picture of what happened in each major event in the epic of natural history as we know it, complete with hypotheses, false starts, proposed models, calibrations, contaminations, and finally promising leads that ultimately end up corroborating with multiple dating methods. The only downside to the book I can think of is a boring second chapter about what we think inspired the King Arthur legend.
Anyway... yeah. We didn't know what happened to the dinosaurs until 1992. THAT'S 1992. I was alive and a fan of the Ninja Turtles. And now we've got the internet, and I'm telling you about how 100 years ago, we didn't have radiometric dating or Lebesgue integration and 200 years ago we didn't know where we came from, and... yeah. We know way totally more than has been known ever. I just hope we don't crack the mystery of how we're going to spectacularly fuck it all up just as quickly as we went from anybody's guess to 4.5 billion years on the age of the Earth. What with the peak oil and the population of the Earth and the global warming and all that.
I have to tell you, this shit is so much more exciting than listening to some pious jerk rattle off whatever story happened to locally win a transgenerational game of telephone. And no one has spoiled the ending for us yet, either! Well, Lord Kelvin sort of did, but forget about that for now.
I probably read it too quickly to be able to internalize the information and be able to effectively represent it in conversation, so maybe I should read or skim it again sometime. But not now. Too much homework to do.
Anyway, holy CRAP have the last 300 years been super productive, science-wise. Bones, Rocks, and Stars is a series of pithy accounts of the investigations that revealed the big picture of what happened in each major event in the epic of natural history as we know it, complete with hypotheses, false starts, proposed models, calibrations, contaminations, and finally promising leads that ultimately end up corroborating with multiple dating methods. The only downside to the book I can think of is a boring second chapter about what we think inspired the King Arthur legend.
Anyway... yeah. We didn't know what happened to the dinosaurs until 1992. THAT'S 1992. I was alive and a fan of the Ninja Turtles. And now we've got the internet, and I'm telling you about how 100 years ago, we didn't have radiometric dating or Lebesgue integration and 200 years ago we didn't know where we came from, and... yeah. We know way totally more than has been known ever. I just hope we don't crack the mystery of how we're going to spectacularly fuck it all up just as quickly as we went from anybody's guess to 4.5 billion years on the age of the Earth. What with the peak oil and the population of the Earth and the global warming and all that.
I have to tell you, this shit is so much more exciting than listening to some pious jerk rattle off whatever story happened to locally win a transgenerational game of telephone. And no one has spoiled the ending for us yet, either! Well, Lord Kelvin sort of did, but forget about that for now.