Al Frankin: Giant of the Senate; Al Frankin; 2017; Hachette Book Group; 394 pgs; bad index16/7/2017 Good Frankin fun. Not a lot new hear, but some fun stories. Fun fact: There are now more high school robotics teams than boy's varsity hockey teams in Minnesota. That is a good sign, especially for young girls. He makes the point that many feel correctly that the economy has left them behind; and that political system is broken and has left them behind, but incorrectly feel that all people in politics are equally to blame. Mitch McConnell et al have taken obstructionism and partisanship to the point of ignoring their actual jobs. The Dems are not entirely innocent but they are not to blame. The last quarter of the book was written post-Trump, so there are some good insights on all that. The index is barely more than a list of people mentioned in the book. But if you want a light read with a few jokes, it fills the bill.
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This book is better than its sequel, A Most Improbable Journey. It deals with larger issues and documents one of the great over-arching discoveries of the 20th century, namely that the Earth was hit by a 10 km wide rock in the Yucatan that wiped out the dinosaurs as well as many other kinds of creatures, such as the ammonites (nautilus like critters that ruled the oceans for millions of years). This all took place October 29, 65,000,0000 years ago, at 9 AM in the mourning. The impact was stupendous. The rock was so big, it's leading edge was grinding a huge hole (the Chicxulub Crater) in the Earth while the trailing edge was still in the upper atmosphere. A second later, it was all over but for the fallout, burning atmosphere, huge tsunamis, and a stifling hot (due to released CO2) "winter", and dust that blacked out the sky. The simultaneous exploding of every nuclear weapon on Earth would be like a fart in the wind by comparison. The story of the discovery surrounds the KT boundary, a thin layer of clay that marks the end of the Cretaceous (and the dinosaurs) and the start of the Tertiary (the first layer of which is the Danian, after the Danish site where it was first described). The idea was floated that a impact may have killed the dinosaurs. Walter's famous physicist Dad, Luis, suggested looking for a radioactive isotope of an element that is found in meteors, but generally not on the Earth's surface, in the KT boundary. Iridium was the final choice. The other "tell" is something called "shocked quartz, which I will leave to reader to find out about. Skip to the end: Iridium was found all over the word in the KT (K is used because C was taken, and it also came from the German for chalk). This is where the story is different from other scientific detective stories. I cannot recall a discovery that had so many scientists excited from so many disciplines. Geology, of course, but paleontology, archeology, planetary astronomy, astro-physics, nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, the physics of impacts, and so on. Soon, evidence was popping up in multiple fields at once, and an idea that was poo-poo-ed became accepted fact in a just a few short years. Sadly Luis died before his idea bore fruit. This is a very approachable book, and a quick must-read for any student of the processes of science (aka human knowledge). Since then ( around 1990), 130 more ancient craters have been found. The Vatican itself is prosecuting two of its officials who have been stealing money from little bambinos...
www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/07/13/vatican-sets-trial-for-2-ex-officials-of-hospital-for-allegedly-diverting-fundraising-money.html I wrote this list in the early 90's. It has since been refined and incorporated into classroom lectures. It has been added to physics and dentistry programs, among others.
Lee Moller Free free to use this list as you see fit, with proper citation. It is a poorly kept secret that many of the upper echelons of the Vatican are gay! And there is nothing wrong with that, unless you spend you whole professional life telling people they will go to hell for that exact same sin.
Click this link to find out more: Vatican rocked: Police raid drug-fuelled gay orgy at cardinal's apartment |
AuthorLee Moller is a life-long skeptic and atheist and the author of The God Con. Archives
January 2024
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