Source: https://xkcd.com/2501/
Alt text: “How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It’s hard to throw a rock without throwing one!”
As someone who does a lot of technical writing this is a real struggle. They call it knowledge basis. Basically you have to know what your target audience knows. Write it too high and people will get lost and not read it. Write at too low of a level and people will get bored and stop reading.
I see that as a win-win situation. Other people can spend the extra time on doing something else, while nobody gets to find any of the mistakes left in the text.
If you knew that everyone would read your texts, you would be super worried about any potential mistakes still left in the final edition. Since, nobody actually reads it, you don’t need to worry about anything.
Best way to cure yourself of this is to become a teacher in your field, especially if you do any teaching of anybody who isn’t already specializing in it (K-12 or for-non-majors college classes). I’m a music teacher and yesterday I had a kid struggle for a full half hour to play a kick drum on a consistent quarter beat. Literally all you have to do is lift your foot up and put it back down again, but at one point he actually asked me “when I pick my foot up, it keeps hitting the bit of the kick pedal above it and that’s throwing me off” and I had to explain to him that he could move his foot half an inch backward and that would stop happening, because apparently he was unable to intuit that. Didn’t seem to help him all that much, though.
He was also wearing running shoes with the laces taken out, which leads me to believe that this is not the only basic thing this ten-year-old child struggles with.
Sorry, I know this isn’t geology related, but I needed to rant about it.
Seems a lot like when i pretended to be overly bad at something so i didnt have to do it
You know, you might just be on to something. He sure didn’t seem like he was particularly into it.
Of quartz
Yeah, I just try not to be agate-keeper.
You son of a bitch, you did it!
Studying history I am immune, because it is obvious that people don’t care.
TIL that ‘feldspar’ is an actual thing and not just a silly name they used in Outer Wilds. Actually, looking it up, all of the Traveler’s names refer to rocks or minerals (Feldspar, Gabbro, Riebeck, Chert, and Esker). Interestingly, Solanum refers to a plant instead (a plant of a genus that includes the potato and woody nightshade).
The Traveler’s names? You mean the members of Outer Wilds Ventures? I’ll do you two better; every Hearthian is named for a mineral, and every Nomai is named after a plant.
Solanum can also be read to mean Solar Year, a complete cycle of the sun, which is even more poetic considering the entangled nature of the end of her journey, and the journey of the Sun.
They take their knowledge of geology for granite.
Olivine: (Mg,Fe)2SiO4.
Feldspar I: KAlSi3O8.
Feldspar Ii: (K,Na)AlSi3O8.
Quarz: SiO2.
Apparently Quartz is the second most abundant mineral in Earth’s continental crust, behind feldspar.Source : Wikipedia
I can maybe remember Quarz.
