"You Want Something Old? Pick Up a Rock."

There’s this thing that happens, sometimes, when a blogger’s busier than an overstocked daycare center whose charges have gotten into the coffee supply and disregarded the decaf. You post a little throwaway something: a video, some photos, a few thoughts. You think nothing of it. You were just filling a gap, sharing something of passing interest that tickled your fancy, and made you think a bit, but didn’t take you more than an hour to slap together, even with having to dig through an external drive for old photos from your craptastic former camera and trying to wrestle something presentable out of them.

You move on to the things that were occupying your attention to start with. Then you notice you’ve caught a few people’s fancy. There’s a comment thread filling up with people sharing their own experiences, and one great and glorious moment where a geology professor wants to filch your post for classroom use. The thing got retweeted around a bit. You delighted the geotweep who’d found the super-awesome video to begin with. And, best of all, you inspired someone else, who riffed off your little post and wrote something utterly wonderful. It’s something that celebrates science, and puts us in perspective. It asks why we’d ever waste our tiny fragment of time with religion when reality is so much more incredible. It goes deep into deep time. And it contains one of my favorite paragraphs ever:

Once my parents were visiting the proprietor of an antique shop in New England.  He said; “You want something old?  Pick up a rock; that’s old.”  And in fact science has revealed just how old, and the resulting figure beggars our evolved imagination.

Pick up a rock. Hold a few million years, perhaps even a few billion, in the palm of your hand. I love an antiques dealer saying that. I love George remembering it, all these years later.

Go read “Our place in time.” It’s just nine short paragraphs, but those few grafs encompass life, the universe, and everything.

I think you’ll see why I always open the links to his posts with the same sensation I got as a kid, tearing the wrapping off the most intriguing present under the tree. George is, in objective fact, a fantastic writer. This one proves it beyond reasonable doubt.

And when you lot see me posting more videos with extras, it’ll be for two reasons: because I’m bloody insanely busy, and because I can’t wait to see what catches your fancy next.

"You Want Something Old? Pick Up a Rock."
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The British Say It Best

I’ve always loved the British talent for dismemberment by seeming compliment. Observe:

Boris Johnson, the lavishly Tory Mayor of London …

However well-intentioned it was, the catastrophic and unpopular intervention in Iraq has served in some parts of the world to discredit the very idea of western democracy.

The recent collapse of the banking system, and the humiliating resort to semi-socialist solutions, has done a great deal to discredit – in some people’s eyes – the idea of free-market capitalism.

Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea.

To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune.

To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president.

Masterful. I really couldn’t have said it better myself.

The British Say It Best