Monthly Archives: June 2019
Does Education Make you Stupider? Pt. 2
Well, the first post didn’t quite have that name but that was kind of the message. In a nutshell, that post discussed research showing that a better basic understanding of science made for more intense partisanship. Now a short article in The Atlantic describes a somewhat similar exercise generated by More in Common, but this time directly addressing partisanship itself. Basically, this summarizes a study asking people questions about the beliefs of their political opposites. And once again, more education seems to make people misjudge reality.
Honestly, this is discouraging. But wait–it gets more bizarre.
Basically Democrats lacking a high school education had a pretty firm fix on the opinions of members of the Republican party, correctly estimating what fraction of Republicans agreed or disagreed with certain policy statements. But as you go up the education ladder, Democrats get worse and worse. Republicans, on the other hand, are pretty…
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Tanis Site: The Day the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Hit
More marvelous discoveries about the tsunami that marked the impact that finished off the dinosaurs
An outstanding account by Scott Buchanan, based on https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2019/03/27/1817407116.full.pdf and other sources, complementing my own earlier https://paulbraterman.wordpress.com/2017/08/14/how-to-kill-the-dinosaurs-in-ten-minutes/ regarding the impact site.
Scott also includes much general background, and detailed discussion of what makes this site special, and why this, like so much else, is incompatible with Young Earth and other creationist thinking.
CONTENTS
Sequences of Fossils in Sedimentary Rock Layers
K-Pg Asteroid Strike
The Tanis K-Pg Event Site
More Findings from the Tanis Site
Other Dinosaur Finds: Tracks, Eggs and Feces
Location of Dinosaur Fossils in the Rock Layers: Is a Recent Global Flood Credible?
More on Paleosols and Vertebrate Burrows
Closing Thoughts on Significance of the Tanis Site
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Sequences of Fossil in Sedimentary Rock Layers
When canal builders surveyed the rocks of Britain in the early 1800s, they noticed that certain fossils only appeared in certain layers, and that the order of these fossils from layer to layer was typically the same all over the country. The same tendency of a well-defined sequential order in fossilized species has been found to hold all over the world. For instance, rock layers containing trilobites are found below, never above, layers containing modern clam species. Rocks with horse fossils are found above, never…
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