rdjon

www.geologyrocks.co.uk

All things geological. Me and my girlfriend designed, built and run it all.

Odd then that scientists have been observing it by satellite and have spent 7 years drilling through 3km of ice there then. Big, thick glacier at 3km

BBC News

The greenland ice sheet is on land though (and near the north pole, so is usually included in the north "Ice Sheet"). If this melted global sea levels would raise by 7m.

Some latest theories put in a clay mineral (smectite, kaolinite), which can be self-replicating. The RNA "piggy-backed" onto the clay mineral and replicated itself. Not entirly sure on this, asI 'm a geophysics man myself, not a biologist.

Just to put in my 2p worth...

Of course organisms are designed. They are designed by selection pressures and their environment. This means that if any one came up with a definition of design, then organisms would appear to be designed, because they are. As for intelligent design, that says to me a proponent doesn't think evolutionary pressure can come up with organisms, it needs some "blueprint" created by a higher being. That, to me, makes it a religous idea, not a scientific one.

Actually I thought the program was pretty good when it was shown in the UK. OK, OK, it was a little sensationalist, perhaps some of the custumes were a little "white" and some of the evidence is speculative, but not too bad overall. They did present most of the relationships between the species well. I do agree that some of the speculation was a little over the top and the use of the words "It is thought..." would have gone a long way to seperate out the speculation from fact.

I think this kind of program is not aimed at those who already know and have an interest in human evolution, but at those who know nothing about it....to that end I think it fulfilled it's purpose - to get people interested.

Jon

It all depends on what I'm doing...

For scientific code that runs through huge arrays or that I'm going to parallelise: Fortran 90

For fast code, system drivers, or code that my be seen outside the scientific community: C/C++

If I have to use a GUI or it needs to run on various machines: Java

Lots of text procesing: Perl

Simple number-crunching: VBA in Excel

Webpages: PHP

It definitely helps knowing a lot of languages In my opinion a programming language is like a tool. You do not use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail, unless you don't have a hammer. Similarly, you don't use Fortran for fancy windows-type software and you don't use perl to write fast software.

Thanks for the comments, blike. The tutorials took have been written over the last 4 years, so yes, time consuming to say the least

Ta for letting me know the server was down last night. It's being moved in June/July to a (hopefully) better server.

So no-one has any opinions at all?

Hi all,

Thought you might like to know about a new geology website:

GeologyRocks.co.uk

Any praise, comments, critisicms or hard cash donations are welcome