Re: Your tax dollars at work: mammoths ballIstics report


rja.carnegie@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Is this a t.o category loony, or something else?
>
> http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1726&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
>
> "A distant supernova that exploded 41,000 years ago may have led to the
> extinction of the mammoth, according to research that will be presented
> by nuclear scientist Richard Firestone of the U.S. Department of
> Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
> Firestone, who conducted this research with Arizona geologist Allen
> West, will unveil this theory at the 2nd International Conference "The
> World of Elephants" in Hot Springs, SD."
>
>
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/24/BAGG9ET78M1.DTL
> The Firestone-West proposal drew quick criticism from a leading expert
> on cosmic impact events, David Morrison of NASA's Ames Research Center
> in Mountain View.
>
> "Apparently, none of this work has been published in a peer-reviewed
> journal," Morrison said in an e-mail to The Chronicle. "The idea that
> debris from a supernova explosion coalesced into low-density,
> comet-like objects is unsupported in terms of any science that I know
> of." Also, the claim of tiny impact craters in the tusks "is pretty
> obviously false," Morrison said. "No such grains could get through the
> atmosphere."
>
> In a phone interview, Firestone, referred to Morrison's criticism about
> particle passage through the atmosphere as "the conventional thinking.
> (But) we have 'em (the particles) in the tusks!" he added with a laugh.
>
>
>
>
> It does sound like this guy Firestone is putting the "berk" into
> Berkeley. It reminds me of t.o partly because of claims elsewhere
> fossils, and maybe mammoths, allegedly preserved in the act of bending
> their necks upwards to try to avoid drowning in Noah's flood. In this
> case the bullet particles in the tusks - which the small print
> indicates only stand for extinction 20,000 years later when a comet
> that was somehow caused by the same supernova fell on the mammoths,
> which evidently were shocked by the initial impact into standing very
> still for a /very/ long time - remind me of that "evidence" in the
> postures of fossils, which of course are not necessarily the postures
> that the creatures held in their last moments of life. They get
> squashed and bent.
>
> The other detail that I liked for the wrong reasons in the San
> Francisco Chronicle version is that mammoths "resembled hippie
> elephants", which I guess is why Lawrence Berkeley Lab is interested,
> even after all these years. But, okay, mammoths had longer hair, but
> otherwise I'd guess that Indian elephants that actually live in the
> part of the human world that has the most meditation, reincarnation,
> incense, long hair, etc., are closer to being hippies?
>
> (On the other hand, those elephants also tend to have steady jobs.)

Yes, well they smell about the same.

.

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