I wish I could remember the times this past week when I've seen discussion of the sciences in general, and a list of what's included... and geology wasn't there. I'm hardly the first geo-blogger to notice and comment. But today I noticed a lack someplace else: The Open Laboratory, the science blogging anthology.
There were posts by geoscientists. There were climate and paleontology posts. There were oceanography posts. There were creation-science-debunking posts.
But geology? Nothing.
When I saw that, I nominated one post, but this is a crazy week for me, and I don't have time to find all the great posts I've read in the geoblogosphere in the past six months. And I'm a newcomer, too - I suspect there were a lot of great posts written before I started actively reading.
So help me out here, and let's keep ourselves from being so invisible.
Maybe if the blogosphere acknowledges that geology exists, schoolkids in California and Texas can start studying the earth sciences, too.
Well, I can dream, can't I?
edit: I remembered one of the places where I saw geology left out of a list: at Wikipedia, in its entry on "special sciences" (as philosophers apparently call them; I had never heard the term before).
Here's the relevant text:
The special sciences are those sciences other than physics that are sometimes thought to be reducible to physics, or to stand in some similar relation of dependence to physics as the "fundamental" science. The usual list includes chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and many others.
Perhaps we should be proud that geology isn't on the list - maybe that means we rank above physics in the philosophers' hierarchy. But I suspect that geology isn't on the list because the philosophers don't even think about it existing, or maybe consider it a form of stamp-collecting.
Monday, November 12, 2007
The Open Lab is a bit short on earth science posts
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9 comments:
JINX!
Great think alike.
Er, great minds. Typing. So difficult.
If someone can write meta-crawler-software to discern between nerdy in-jokes and geologically informative posts, it's probably Ms. McMoots.
Otherwise you're looking at a pretty small signal to noise ratio.
Well, Thermochronic has a sidebar with geologic reference posts. I haven't read most of them, because most were written before I started reading, but I figure they're a good place to look for things to submit. And Chris Rowan has a "basics" tag - that's a way to separate the geology from the rugby.
Our biggest problem might be finding stuff that doesn't really too much on images.
Also, bloggers can nominate themselves. It may seem egotistical, but you may remember which of your posts had fewer in-jokes (and might be interesting to outsiders).
I'm actually been considering geo-related posts to nominate for OpenLab 2007, both mine and others', for a while. I definitely planning to nominate a couple - and arm-twist the organiser to recognise that biology blogging is, like, so 2006...
Furthermore, we can always do something on our own initiative - maybe an end-of-year edition of the Accretionary Wedge, with all the best geology posts from 2007?
Haha. There's a reason why the only post of mine I submitted was *not* about geology - it's quite difficult to avoid the in-jokes and jargon puns.
the comments above make me think we should have an edition of The Wedge highlighting the sense of humor in the geoblogging community ... especially Thermochronic, Lab Lemming, and Yami ... they crack me up.
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