8 ms·
So where did all the salt originate?
by poulsbohemian 6y ago
So where did all the salt originate?
- poulsbohemian 6y agoReally, somebody downvoted me for asking this? Didn't see anything about it in the article, and if anybody knows, I'd love for them to share.
- guerrilla 6y agoMaybe they thought you sounded skeptically dismissive or something. I could see that reading.
- poulsbohemian 6y agoY'know... I've been on this site for nearly a decade now, and the discourse here just gets weirder and weirder. I give Dang credit - the guy clearly has good intensions and is working hard to make this a civil forum, but... sometimes I wonder if I've just gotten old and just need to go crawl under a rock somewhere, because the ability for people to have constructive and meaningful dialog here is seriously lacking.
- quieterthanu 6y agodon't be discouraged. they are not the majority only the loud
- jdoss 6y agoDon't let the downvotes get you down. I was thinking the same question and I'm glad you asked it.
- cjbenedikt 6y agoI Agee completely
- vmception 6y agosadly, dang wants people to ignore discussions about consensus. which means questioning why any user silently disagreed is off limits and can result in more downvotes! its "unsubstantive", why wonder how to relate to the audience here, just post substantive comments no matter what! Oh ignore that rate limit that gets enabled due to community downvotes haha don't question that either. maybe there should be a meta HN, like how stackoverflow has a meta version of the site
- parsecs 6y agoI don't think "getting a couple downvotes from random strangers on the internet" means "the ability for people to have constructive and meaningful dialog here is seriously lacking"
- bpodgursky 6y agoThe downvotes here are super reflexive and common though. Reddit (at least the parts I'm on) is nowhere near as instinctively negative.
- NetOpWibby 6y agoThis is the reason I joined Lobsters but then I found elitism. No community is perfect. Le sigh.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>Reddit (at least the parts I'm on) is nowhere near as instinctively negative. True. But once the votes start going one way or the other and the sheep can see how they're supposed to feel about a comment the votes really go wild in that direction. Controversial things here tend to bounce around a low net number of up/down votes a lot more.
- guerrilla 6y agoI thought they added a feature to stop this from happening. It doesn't show which way the vote is going for some period of a time or something like that.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoI think the mods have to enable it for their sub.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoDepends on the context. It's one thing to get down-voted for pointing out some ideologically inconvenient thing or asking a question that's tough to answer in a logically consistent manner. But this was a question about rocks. It's hard to find less inflammatory subject matter than that. All people had to do was take it at face value and not click a button. But they didn't they assumed bad intent. Behavior like that reflects upon the community in the same way that Reddit thinking you can't buy or sell goods via classified ads without a high likelihood getting scammed (to pick one example) is a reflection on that community.
- Karawebnetwork 6y agoVotes go down and up and that's normal. You comment seemed skeptically dismissive, so it was downvoted. Once someone responded and you interacted in a way that showed your true interest, subsequent readers no longer perceived it as skeptical. As a result, your votes increased.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wombatmobile 6y agoI upvoted your question because I thought it was a good question. Thanks for asking it. Votes are an expression of the state of mind of the moderator. That’s all. They do affect and the tenor of the host environment, but only in the aggregate, over time. You are a child of the universe. No less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding, as it should.
- ncmncm 6y agohttp://cantrip.org/gamers-desiderata.html http://cantrip.org/gamers-desiderata.html For people of "a certain age". When I was a teen, Desiderata posters were everywhere. Then, suddenly! they were all gone, and only old people remember them. Nowadays hardly anybody even remembers the ramps and crates.
- nobody9999 6y ago>For people of "a certain age". For people even older there was this, which is likely where the person who adapted it got the idea from: http://web.mit.edu/~yandros/poetry/deteriorata http://web.mit.edu/~yandros/poetry/deteriorata
- dang 6y agoPlease don't do this. It's against the site guidelines (see the second-to-last at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and for good reason. Your GP comment, which was just fine, ended up being heavily upvoted—but now we have this off-topic subthread lingering on as uncollected garbage. Downvotes are frustrating, but the only thing that really works is to examine one's comment to see what might have attracted downvotes. If you notice something, great—that's information for next time. If you notice nothing, well, that happens, and most often (not always!) other users come along and make corrective upvotes to fix the situation. In egregious situations, if you notice a comment that's downvoted and really shouldn't be, you or anyone are welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We'll fix it and we also sometimes remove downvoting rights from accounts that went crazy with them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- labster 6y agoSupernovae, originally. As the Earth cooled, salts in rocks dissolved. When the Arctic Ocean started mixing with other oceans, the brine was entrained in over time.
- poulsbohemian 6y agoThank you! This is good info.
- wombatmobile 6y agoWhen? When had most of the salt dissolved into the sea?
- mnl 6y agoOxygen, for instance, comes from supernovae too, so following this implied line of reasoning also would water. I don't think the question was about nucleosynthesis and certainly supernovae don't eject salts, they form much later after planetary differentiation.
- labster 6y agoThey asked an eli5 question, I gave an eli5 answer. Which is totally okay! Not all of us hackers spent/wasted our college years in the geosciences. I left out lots of stuff, like chemical weathering, thermohaline circulation, glacial damming, and Milankovich cycles which probably explain a lot more... but I’m a climatologist not a geologist so there’s a whole lot more about the chemistry I don’t understand.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- saagarjha 6y agoThat's a smart 5 year old you've got there that knows about stellar evolution ;)
- 6y ago
- wombatmobile 6y agoAll through history, availability of salt has been pivotal to civilization. In Britain, the suffix "-wich" in a placename means it was once a source of salt, as in Sandwich and Norwich. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_salt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_salt
- pacaro 6y agoIIRC the Norfolk Broads (an interconnected series of lakes and waterways in the same part of the country as Norwich and Ipswich) were dug by the Romans who burned peat to make salt We get the word salary from salt too
- krylon 6y agoIt is not even 8am, and I learned something interesting already. Thank you very much!
- gerdesj 6y agoSource "King of the North" by Max Adams: "The Old English ending -wic ... means farm, as in Keswick (cheese farm), or Goswick (goose farm) ... but it might denote a periodic, opportunistic beach market ... for example Lundenwic (London), Gypeswic (Ipswitch) and so on."
- phaemon 6y agoIt seems it came to be applied to farms in some areas, but it was more widely used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-wich_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-wich_town
- hactually 6y agoWe were taught in school it originated from the water cycle. Essentially the salt is part of the process where we have fresh water on land, running toward the ocean carrying nutrients/minerals (including salt) into the ocean. Put that on auto for a few million years and you have the current ocean.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hulitu 6y ago> So where did all the salt originate? Bilions of tourists urinating in the water.
- fogihujy 6y agoThe salts themselves are results of various chemical processes both on Earth and elsewhere.