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Jesus, this is a bad article. It's filled with several very bad attempts at humor and buries the lede but my main problem is that it's just wrong. "there is an
by owenversteeg 6y ago
Jesus, this is a bad article. It's filled with several very bad attempts at humor and buries the lede but my main problem is that it's just wrong.
"there is an enduring mystery to dirt: where does it come from?", "Mystery of dirt’s origins is a thorny experimental problem"
Why would they try to pretend nobody knows where soil comes from!? Did they not even bother to Google the word "soil"? "Soil formation" is the third heading on Wikipedia. There's an entire field dedicated to soil formation: pedogenesis! Soil science isn't some new start-up field where everything's unknown - soil scientists can give you a pretty damned good estimate of not only where soil comes from but how many nutrients it will have over time, what microbes are in it, what will happen to the soil over time, etc etc.
Unfortunately this kind of thing seems to be par for the course for SciAm. A writer picks out some random new research and writes about it as if it's groundbreaking. Unfortunately, 99.5% of research isn't the discovery of DNA, it's "we tested if bacteria A has more xyz than bacteria B and the difference was not statistically significant."
I'm reminded of https://xkcd.com/683/ https://xkcd.com/683/
- brudgers 6y agoLogically, all xkcd references in comments resolve to https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ including this one.
- neonate 6y agoNice. Did you just come up with that?
- unexaminedlife 6y agoAre you saying that we should expect that websites who try to portray themselves as "experts" or "sources" shouldn't be called out? I've always read that xkcd as someone arguing with someone on social media, not with a magazine who markets themselves as an organization who has "expert insights on the most important and awe-inspiring advances in science and technology", or "Scientific American is the essential guide to the modern world".
- dang 6y agoNormally we'd change the title to something neutral, but in this case the article is so sodden with it that it has soaked the thread as well. That happens sometimes. I'm not sure if it's getting more common; I rather think it isn't, actually; fingers crossed.