Longest Running Thread EVER

[L. Marcus]

You sure?

[Cancer]

Yes.  Texas barbecue is beef, not pork or long pork.

[Duke Bushido]

On 12/4/2024 at 10:49 PM, Cancer said:

Yes.  Texas barbecue is beef, not pork

 

The two reasons I dont eat it, actually.

 

 

 

[Cancer]

By virtue of living (mostly) on the West Coast most of my life (ten years for grad school and first job thereafter notwithstanding) I managed to avoid some of the interregional barbecue religious wars.  Having only lived in Texas and central Indiana, I haven't known ardent partisans of non-beef barbecue, and I can't say I've ever really sampled those.  I'm willing to partake and be persuaded....

[Rails]

Come to Kansas City--we barbecue pretty much everything . . . pork, beef, chicken, turkey, (and probably duck and goose, if you know where to look)--and it's *all* good.

[Cancer]

I've driven past Kansas City, but that's all.  I have heard its reputation (and that of several other places) but it has never been a big enough draw to make it a destination.

[Cancer]

Took in an interesting talk today, by a geologist trying to find where eukaryotes first appear in quantity in the geologic record.   (Eukaryotes include all multi-celled organisms.)  Being a geologist, he was looking for microfossils and for chemical traces in dateable rocks.  Turns out a profitable place to look is in the McArthur Basin in Northern Territory of Australia; drill cores are especially useful for this research, and hundreds of such cores have been taken and his group used.  Being neither a geologist nor an evolution biologist I am not going to try to duplicate his results here, though as someone who's been reading about the origins and evolution of life on Earth I had a lot of the background stuff already in my memory.

[L. Marcus]

Eh -- the Great Old Ones done it. In Australia.

[Bazza]

In my home state/territory. 

[Cancer]

There isn't a lot of land of that age (2.2 - ~0.8 Gyr) remaining intact and accessible around the world.  There's another swath in northern China, but dealing with the Chinese is never easy.  (The speaker I referred to is based at McGill University, in Canada, and using Commonwealth ties makes it easier to get work done in Australia.)

Edited December 10, 2024 by Cancer

[L. Marcus]

I think our mountains are rock of that age, and Greenland has rock over three billion years old.

[Cancer]

Yeah, there's more criteria than just the age.  Not being a geologist, I couldn't tell you what those are.

[L. Marcus]

At a guess, the ability to beget microfossils ... ?

[Cancer]

Preserve them, I think.

[Bazza]

There are many Santaists here m’thinks. 

[Cancer]

Perhaps more Santanaists than Santaists, though.

[Cancer]

Back at home after a month and a half in Texas doing astrophysics for the first time this century.  Plus a week of extreme frustration trying to get science software installed on a Linux box.  Almost enough frustration for me to put Linux people on my list of Hitler Redemption Groups for another twenty years.