Slashdot Mirror
World's Largest Fossil Forest, and One of the Oldest
solitas writes in with news from last week of the discovery of a fossilized forest in Illinois. The forest was found in the ceiling of a working coal mine, 250 feet below the surface. It was drowned 300 million years ago in an earthquake, its discoverers speculate — here is a graphic of its formation. Geologists are excited because the huge fossilized forest, over 25 square miles in extent, preserves trees and other plants upright, as they grew.
did the ground below just sank/moved suddenly (25 square miles no less)?
Yes, the same thing happened a few weeks ago in the Solomon Islands. In an earth quake, a tectonic plate under one of the islands was thrust up ten or twelve feet.
Remember the tsunami a year and a half ago? There, an under water fault thrust up a tectonic plate just a few feet, but several miles long. That was the cause of the tsunami.
Go take a geology course at your local college (Junior College?). I did that last semester and loved it. I'm thinking about changing from Electronics to Geology. It's outside work, it pays pretty well, and there's actually a growing demand... And I'm getting really tired of computers kicking my ass on a daily basis.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Yes, they're speculating
..."
They're not asserting, they're not theorizing, they're not even hypothesizing. Because before you can get to that point, you have to ask questions. You have to say, "I wonder if
For every scientist who actually makes an outrageous claim, there are a million idiots saying, "Those damn scientists, always claiming stuff they can't prove!" whether or not that bears any relation to what's really going on. Sure, unsupported claims in science are a problem. But a bigger problem is anti-scientists who deliberately fail to differentiate between theory, hypothesis, and that first-step sense of wonder which is at the root of discovery.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"As a Christian"
Why do Christians say that like it's a badge of honour? It's not, it's an admission of belief in invisible super-beings, magic, superstition and other rubbish. It's no more rational than "As an Santa Clausian" or "As an Easter Bunnyite".