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How Earth Resembles a Gooey Confection
Posted by
timothy
on Sun May 04, 2008 01:18 AM
from the distinct-lawyers-of-slime dept.
from the distinct-lawyers-of-slime dept.
Ant contributes a link spotted on Neatorama that may upset middle school Earth Science teachers, writing "LiveScience says Earth's simple schematic is not core, mantle, and crust anymore. It is more like the gooey center of a chocolate morsel harboring peanut butter and honey. Inner Earth is far more nuanced than outward appearances would suggest. A new model is proposed in the May 2, 2008, issue of the journal Science."
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Tolkein will be offended too... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes, but (Score:4, Funny)
Earth. That's the stuff.
moon is made of cheese (Score:2)
It's actually more like fondue (Score:2)
But space travel is perfectly possible - you're doing it every time you go into a subway. The Apollo missions were carefully planned to land on the colder harder spots, which is why they didn't sink in.
Remember,
Hey! (Score:2)
It CANNOT be THAT different.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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In this case, scientists have to extrapolate a lot from what information they have. How do we truly know the mixture of matter 100-4000 miles below us when the most we can dig is 2 miles? I'm guessing the basics are still the same - average density, average temperature, but otherwise it's always been a bit of guessing (and still is)
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That's true: we all swore not to talk about it, so it's not so hard to understand why did you get your facts so wrong. It was not a teleporter but a multistate cat sandbox on the Potemkin battleship.
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It is not as simple as LiveScience apparently paints it - the low velocity seismic zones are well-known to geologists and have been explained by theory fairly completely.
Though this isn't what they're talking about, there are different zones of seismic velocity within the layers themselves due to changes in temperature, pressure, and composition of the material, which leads to zones of partial
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Perhaps the larger problem is our natural egotism! What we have discovered is "absolute truth", rather than the more reasonable approach of "the best explanation available".
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For example - until the widespread deployment of GPS, obtaining highly accurate and precise time was expensive. Now, seismometers with accurate and precise clocks can be deployed much more widely and cheaply because all you requir
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In Other News.... (Score:3, Funny)
Bastards! (Score:3, Funny)
Mmmmmmmmm.... (Score:2)
Chocolate, peanut butter AND honey? (Score:2)
Aren't they confused ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Supersonic Nazi Hell Creatures (Score:4, Funny)
The diagram is a lie (Score:3, Funny)
Toothpaste (Score:2)
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tolkein (Score:2)
Of course! (Score:4, Funny)
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Man, no wonder... (Score:3, Funny)
Article Envy (Score:4, Insightful)
Expert photography, graphic design, 3D modeling, and UNIX system administration are all things that used to require intensive training begetting membership in a professional class. Nowadays, you can pick these things up by hanging out and contributing in online forums, newsgroups, mailing lists, and IRC chat channels. These communities of practice learn expert-grade information, but it also allows techniques to evolve and for new techniques to propagate quickly; in this sense, these communities can actually be better than classic forms of learning.
We're even seeing interesting communities of practice being built up around legal studies, which is a domain that is firmly held by one of the most exclusive professional classes - lawyers. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that in the next five years.
But one place where communities of practice are being squelched is science. You can't go into a forum and ask, "Hey, the Donovan lab group at Boston University suggests foo in this article [slashdot.org], but that doesn't jibe with Mulkasey's findings at Stanford in this article [slashdot.org]. What's the deal?"
I mean, you could. But then the number of people who could contribute to the conversation would be tiny, and nobody else would pay attention.
So here's the position I'm advancing. Communities of practice are the single best way to create a dialog around science, and has the potential to:
1) Integrate the knowledge of disparate labs
2) Drive questions in scientific inquiry
3) Become a major center of debate, and a referencable, living repository of ongoing issues
4) Generate interest in the sciences
5) Give direction to students (who see thousands of articles with no coherent "story" to tie them together except for biased and incomplete review articles)
6) Finally create real connections with the public consciousness in a way that's a million times better than current science journalism.
The lack of public availability of these articles prevents the creation of these communities of practice.
PS: I think this approach would make conferences virtually obsolete, except in mode of presentation.
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Your successful examples are essentially experimental communities, where discussions can center entirely around facts without interpretation (eg how many pixels in such and such a camera?, etc). That's a low barrier to entry.
Science is different because most issues are either closely tied with interpretations, or tied to experiments which are too expensive to be duplicated by just anybody anymore. So you can't have the kind of photography club interaction where facts can be
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Think about the plight of a high school student who is choosing a college and a degree. If he's like most prospective biology students, he's thinking, "Biology is interesting. I want to study biology." He doesn't stand a chance of thinking, "There are all these fascinating, unanswered questions in the discipline, and I wan
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Spreading information is a worthy goal, which historically is the province of journals and magazines. Not all magazines aim to be technically exact, eg Scientific American is a good example of trying to spread inexact information far and wide, with references for those interested in digging deeper.
What I don't agree with is the idea that shadow communities of enthusiasts, arguing from second hand information in the
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Four years of open-ended study before you can even think about how your knowledge fits into the big picture? I r
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I think you're conflating thinking about a picture and contributing to the picture. People can start thinking about the big picture whenever they want: there's books of all levels out there, and it's common for 12 year olds and up to be interested in and discussing the big picture
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Intelligent design? (Score:2)
OMNOMNOMNOM (Score:2, Funny)
Re:OMNOMNOMNOM (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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I propose that we immediately start surveying our neighbor planets for their contents. Maybe we find out that Venus is filled with mustard -- we could then arrange it so that Galactus eats Venus first; once he's thoroughly disgusted we tell him that all planets in our solar system are mustard-filled. That might save us.
It is, however, abundantly clear that we must give NASA the funds to conduct this kind of expl
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They may not teach spontaneous generation but they teach spontaneous creation despite all its flaws and assumptions (which aren't discussed of course to keep it the 'perfect' theory). It's called evolution.
(sigh) I know you're trolling, but I'll bite, anyway.
Evolution has little to do with the origin of life. You would do well to remember that Darwin called his book "On the Origin of Species", not "On the Origin of Life". I think it's interesting that creationists and intelligent design (sorry, it doesn't merit capitals) advocates try to confuse evolution with the origin of life. Somewhat like trying to say that electricity made no sense when it's ruling equations were unknown. Deal wi
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The origin of life on this planet -- which means the origin of the first self-replicating molecule -- is hard to study, because it (probably) only happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions from those with which we are familiar. We may never know how it happened. Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed...
Just two years ago he still stated that the origin of life and evolution were different things. Would you be so kind to point me to references of his conflating both to deny the existence (I'd rather say essence, but that's a Cartesian debate for another day) of God?
Re:They won't even notice (Score:4, Interesting)
Sir, your post is all over the place.
You are quite wrong. Christian Theology, the belief in a single sovereign God, having been based on God's written word, is "about" all things pertaining to God's adequacy and right to rule humankind, and therefore includes the origin of everything (and we are an object property of said everything).
Science is "about" [about.com]
So then, you see, both the Bible (which term I will use rather than Theology, since when referencing theology you must be specific as to whose theology) and Science attempt to tell us What has happened: the physical space of the universe came into existence, followed by the stars and other heavenly bodies, geological formations occurred on earth while sitting in the midst of waters, vegetation began to live 'according to its kind,' creatures of the sea began life, then winged creatures of the sky ('heavens'), then living beasts on the surface of the ground; finally, mankind emerged on the scene, was superior to all of these previous lifeforms and was made out of dust (and Science certainly agrees that humans are composed of many of the same elements as dirt).
They also attempt to tell us Why it happened. The Bible says that God 'created the earth even for it to be inhabited,' or in other words, made the earth as a perfect home to host his creations. Science does not really have an explanation to 'why,' but empirical evidence over thousands of years has proven true the fact that the earth truly is a wonderful home to life on it. Science agrees with this too, in that the placement of the earth relative to the Sun is just right to keep us from freezing and from frying. The combination of gasses that make up our atmosphere are just right to keep everything from being either wholly flammable or toxic to breathe.
Relegating religionists and promoters of intelligent design to this class you deem 'anti-intellectual' really couldn't be more wrong. If one takes the time to discern what the Bible really says regarding creation, they will find it quite stimulating as well as accurate.
Parent
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Science is generally as irrelevant to religeon as wondering what sort of coffee Jesus would drink if he turned up tomorrow instead of what he would talk about - it's about details and not messages. Also one of the reasons
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Then I beg you to tell us "whose Bible" too. It's not as if there were only one, you know.
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No, you didn't. Just look for "greek" or "hebrew" on your post: no notion of them. And that's more to my point: you are so "subsumed" by the "my book is *the* book" you are even unconciusly falling in you own trap -to ignore that there're other "books". For one, Theology is not so much about Hebrew and Christian scriptures but about analyzing "the meaning of G
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