Teachers

[Stu]

I have recently discovered how important it is to check what teachers are teaching your kids - and I am annoyed!

This morning, I was looking through a friend's son's school workbook. Inside it were some printed handouts apparently made by teachers and these related to the history of the earth and I spotted some glaring errors! Among them were:

1. A paper about what was referred to as "Snowball Earth", which was described as the Ice-Age in which humans had to fight to survive. Utter nonsense, of course, as the "snowball earth" was way before even the dinosaurs and nothing to do with the last Ice Age.

2. A paper entitled "Life in the Pliocene Epoch" showing modern humans - cave men - sitting around a fire, and there was a cooking pot drawn in the picture. OK, maybe this might have been a reasonable depiction of humans 30,000 years ago, but in there were no humans like us during the Pliocene. I guess the writer had meant to say "Pleistocene".

I know people can make mistakes, but those designing these handouts have access to the Internet and a quick check on a search engine would have revealed that they were writing nonsense that children will install in their memories as facts, only to be made to feel silly when someone spots such basic errors.

So check what they are teaching your kids!

[Kirbstone]

A very good point, Stu.

A small boy went to his Mum and asked her the very important question, 'Where did we come from?' and the Mum explained all about the Biblical Adam & Eve and the Garden of Eden and the illicit eating of the apple, followed by expulsion from that said Garden, then on to Noah &c &c.

He then put the same question to his Dad, who launched into a precis'd account of the Evolution of early hominids from the primates, and Neanderthals, Homo Erectus &c &c followed by the ascendency of Homo Sapiens who became modern Man.

The boy was very confused and went back to his Mum and told her all about his Dad's version, whereupon the Mum said: 'Darling, Dad was talking about HIS side of the family !!

Tom

[Caultron]

I've often wondered how this came about:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/801992646114531880/

I suppose it was Opposites Day or something like that but more info would be fun to know, eh?

[moonshadow]

Just be glad you're not raising your kids in Louisiana, where creationism is the lesson of the day, where a kid who dares to say the planet might actually be older than 6,000 years, and isn't flat would earn you the popularity of a boy skirt wearer.

[crfriend]

Just be glad you're not raising your kids in Louisiana, where creationism is the lesson of the day, where a kid who dares to say the planet might actually be older than 6,000 years, and isn't flat would earn you the popularity of a boy skirt wearer.

I have so much fun with those concepts in public I'm not certain what I'd use for fodder for stirring up the unwary in their absence.

Just fairly recently I was busy winding up a co-worker about the fact that the world is flat -- and, yes, I know we have photographs of it form space -- and was in the process of justifying that assertion by pointing out the fact that all we'd done was going "up", and we never got around it far enough to see the edge. This caused some consternation on the part of the youngster in the office who wasn't in on my approach. Much laughter was had on the matter.

On the 6,022 year old claim -- and that's receding by one calendar year per calendar year now -- I've had lots of fun with that one as well. The problem is is that the Vice President of the United States of America believes it as gospel. This puts me in the uncomfortable position of wishing the current President a healthy time in office. (What's this about satire having no place in the modern world?)

Men is skirts are small-fry compared to stuff like that.

[moonshadow]

I know right! I keep trying to tell people that the Earth is NOT 6,000 years old, it is 5,778 years old!

Gheeze!

And I still can't believe that here in Appalachia, there are people who almost violently will argue that the Earth is indeed FLAT... And yet when I point out the window, what do we see...?



What the hell man!?! That doesn't look very FLAT to me!

[Kirbstone]

Ah but it IS flat!

Where I worked in North Germany the nearest hill that was actually 160 feet above sea level was 100 miles South of me! Everything else above the horizon is man-made or planted, trees and buildings, for instance.

Here in Co. Kildare where we built Kirbstone Towers the highest ground for miles around is the raised sphagnum-peat bogs, which for aeons have grown up from the swamps where they started to form square miles of raised bog some 30-50 feet deep.

Re: the age....an American asked a London Natural History Museum curator how old a particular Great Auk's egg was, to which the curator replied 'Seven million and four years'. Astounded, the American asked him how he could possibly be so accurate, to which the curator replied: 'When I came to work here first four years ago that egg was seven million years old!'

So There...!

Tom

[crfriend]

What the hell man!?! That doesn't look very FLAT to me!

It may be locally lumpy but that does not mean that the thing's round (or, more properly, spherical [0]). For God's sake, man, get with the programme!


[0] Of course it's round. It's pizza-shaped. And it's flat, just like a pizza. Note that pizzas are locally lumpy; it's the pepperoni.

[moonshadow]

But then the pizza is not flat! What about the crust? Are you saying the Earth is a thin crust pizza??

And for being flat, I sure broke one heck of a sweat getting to this elevation... Note the rock under my feet.

(That's one hell of a pepperoni!)




This part of the Earth comes to a point! Clearly friends, the Earth is a pyramid!

[moonshadow]

You will also note on the first photo, there are three periods for male dress all situated on one small rock at the top of the world...

The man of the past,

The man of the present,

and the man of the future....

Can you guess who's who?

[crfriend]

But then the pizza is not flat! What about the crust? Are you saying the Earth is a thin crust pizza??

Whether it's thin-crust or deep-dish makes no fundamental difference. However, if if was thin-crust we'd probably have drilled through it by now looking for oil.

And for being flat, I sure broke one heck of a sweat getting to this elevation... Note the rock under my feet.

Notice that I sad, "locally lumpy". It looks like somebody left a bone-fragment in the pepperoni.

This part of the Earth comes to a point! Clearly friends, the Earth is a pyramid!

I do have to admit that there is one compelling reason to believe that the place is semi-spherical -- if it wasn't, cats would have pushed everything off by now.

[crfriend]

You will also note on the first photo, there are three periods for male dress all situated on one small rock at the top of the world...

There are only two unambiguous males in the photograph.

What's 5,000 feet below the base of the lump you're standing on?

You draw "Man of the future".

[moonshadow]

What's 5,000 feet below the base of the lump you're standing on?

Well considering this particular pepperoni is only about 3,000 feet above sea level, I'd say that at 5,000 feet down you're starting to get into the hot plate that the pizza is resting on.

What's really wild is the atmosphere of a dome. When we take a vapor (lighter than air) that we can see and discharge it in an inverted glass bowl, we notice it collects at the top of the bowl. Thus it makes no sense that the atmosphere should be thinner at higher elevations. It would seem that the higher you get in the dome, the thicker the air should be.

My conclusion is that there IS not dome over the Earth, rather it is a cylindrical shaped tube with a glass top, this is for even distribution of the atmosphere across the pizza!

However, even with a atmospheric cylinder, the air should still be thicker at the top, and yet is is not. So I suspect there is a large ventilator located at the top of the tube that sucks the thick our out, cleans it, and returns it to the earth in large air conditioning ducts around the arctic zones. So it's perfectly acceptable to continue pollute the sky, as God will use his magic straw to suck all the nasties out..... I mean there has to be... have you ever stunk up a bathroom without a ventilator! It just hangs in the room!

Science.... lose-ee-anna style!

[moonshadow]

Re: the age....an American asked a London Natural History Museum curator how old a particular Great Auk's egg was, to which the curator replied 'Seven million and four years'. Astounded, the American asked him how he could possibly be so accurate, to which the curator replied: 'When I came to work here first four years ago that egg was seven million years old!'

When I get to be an old man, in about 40 years, when someone argues with me of the age of the Earth, I will reply, "I know for a FACT the Earth is over 4 billion years old!"

They will say "How??"

"Because I was there..."

[crfriend]

Well considering this particular pepperoni is only about 3,000 feet above sea level, I'd say that at 5,000 feet down you're starting to get into the hot plate that the pizza is resting on.

OK, so "thin-crust" it is. I like thin-crust. Deep-dish just never did it for me, not to mention that horrid cookie-crust stuff....

What's really wild is the atmosphere of a dome. When we take a vapor (lighter than air) that we can see and discharge it in an inverted glass bowl, we notice it collects at the top of the bowl. Thus it makes no sense that the atmosphere should be thinner at higher elevations. It would seem that the higher you get in the dome, the thicker the air should be.

Save that it doesn't work that way. Except for tightly-controlled situations (e.g. hot-air balloons) lighter-than-air (of which most is "hot air", as produced by politicians and Internet bloviators) is a rarity. In the "hot air" case, much of the overall mass of that is water vapour which will condense at the periphery, cool off in the process, with the water vapour returning to the pizza as rain (this is why day-old pizza reheated in a microwave is so ghastly) and a gentle downdraught of air.

To the bathroom analogy, hydrogen sulfide is heavier than air at normal temperature and will hang where you drop it save for local zephyrs.

It's all physics, lad, let's not confound it!