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> But uh, prehistoric biomass, raises a bit of an issue. We have the entire history of Middle Earth written down and I… didn’t notice the part where Tolkien men
by smallerfish 4y ago
> But uh, prehistoric biomass, raises a bit of an issue. We have the entire history of Middle Earth written down and I… didn’t notice the part where Tolkien mentioned dinosaurs?
Misconception. Coal doesn't come from dinosaurs; primarily it comes from plants (algae, trees) and plankton. It was formed in the carboniferous period, during which the evolution of plants had preceded the evolution of microbes that were able to digest lignin and cellulose; thus, vast piles of carbon-containing material piled up, got compressed, and formed the coal (and oil) deposits we see today. Yes, of course sometimes animals fell into the bogs and became part of the deposits, but trying to explain the scale of carbon deposits with mass graves of dinosaurs is a little silly.
- rendall 4y agoAh, you missed the author's footnote to your excerpt. > Yes, strictly speaking dinosaurs aren’t needed for coal as coal mostly is made of plant biomass, you fun ruining hack of a pedant. https://featherlessbipeds.substack.com/p/why-didnt-gandalf-own-a-colt-45#footnote-18 https://featherlessbipeds.substack.com/p/why-didnt-gandalf-o... Commenters beware, the article is filled with such gotchas for the careless reader.
- smallerfish 4y agoHaha. Granted I didn't check his footnotes, but that's pretty lazy writing, and feels more like he corrected it as an afterthought rather than editing his core text.
- ghaff 4y agoI sort of agree but one of my general regrets with web publishing vs. pages on paper (or even a formatted PDF) is that footnotes which bulletproof, add nuance, provide parenthetical detail, etc. don't work nearly as well because you can't just glance at them.
- eru 4y agoGwern does a good job with them on his website.
- ghaff 4y agoHe does but you're still clicking through rather than casually glancing at the bottom of a page as you would be a book or paper. Footnotes (or endnotes) are fine on the web (or Kindle, etc.) for reference that most people won't read. They're less good for parenthetical text.
- eru 4y agoOh, I had his sidenotes in mind. See https://www.gwern.net/Sidenotes https://www.gwern.net/Sidenotes Though for some reason, the sidenotes don't show up on my browser for his site at the moment?..
- gwern 4y agoThey should still be working as ever. You may have changed the zoom level or possibly we changed some dimension slightly and your screen is no longer wide enough to provide adequate space for sidenotes. (And I'd point out that even when you don't have sidenotes, the footnotes are still better than usual because they pop up on hover - no click necessary unless you disabled JS entirely, at which point /shrug, you've indicated you don't want fancy frills so enjoy your old-fashioned 1995-style footnote hyperlinks.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PeterisP 4y agoThe point made a bit further in article is that in Middle Earth, unlike our world, there is no carboniferous period of millions of years before the ascent of intelligent hominids. The events of Lord of the Rings happen ~50k years after the creation of the world.
- gilbetron 4y agoThere's actually some doubt about the lignin hypothesis: https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/technology/2016/05/12/geology-carboniferous-period-was-coal/23657316007/ https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/technology/2016/05/12/ge... Which I found out about recently.