Twitter account locked

[20181102]
Not sure what's happened here.   Guessing, the reason is either over clipping pics from google's imagesearch to juxtapose with some of mine to make a point, (Or possibly my "Today's Page" twitterposts to #platetectonics #tectonics #structuralgeology #earthscience #geoscience #geology) advertising an alternative view to Plate Tectonics were deemed not to be cuddly-feely enough in a collegiate sort of way.  Don't know, .. no-one ever commented, far less complained.  If my account "exhibited unusual behaviour" then it could only have been on account of the void it was encountering. But evidently someone complained.

[20181103]
Twitter has deleted all my tweets to those #tags, so it looks like the "possibly" (above) just got elevated to a higher standard in keeping with the general integrity of my blog. So, .. where to from here?  Pending, I guess. (Unlocking? :- I don't use a mobile phone and Twitter does not offer an email option (just sms). Maybe one day I'll get a mobile, meanwhile, .. I can't help reflecting on those deletions. I did delete one or two myself when I realised they were essentially forums for teachers and their very young pupils, but on consideration (since it's highly unlikely that young pupils would be spending their time looking at 'homework')(but if they did then so much the better) I thought no harm would be done if teachers realised there were genuinely respectable alternative views around to Plate Tectonics that could even be discussed with very young children to help them  understand that ideas are different from facts, and thereby to help "inspire them" to be more critical of the world than they might otherwise be.  I wrote a note several years ago regarding my own experience on that score (but I was by then a youngish middle-teenager) (link)

But they were also (mostly) forums for much more senior people with geology degrees, a number of them teachers. I find it appalling that the response, instead of commenting on my posts (which was the reason why I *was* posting), was to complain to Twitter and have them deleted and my account peremptorily blocked. So much for the free-thinking educators who have learned their rote lessons well enough to feel threatened by "alternative views". (I very much doubt if Twitter would have the geological expertise to have done it of their own volition. My guess is they have acted on perceived superior 'authority', which (as my site is designed to show) is unwarranted.

20181105
Noted yesterday. 10 tweets to followers (only) replying to a post by the BBC's science writer drawing attention to the 50th anniversary of Plate Tectonics) had also been deleted (while a more expletive and populist one is retained). I used it as the foundation for ten key points against Plate Tectonics ('slingshots page'). So the protest could have originated either from the BBC or the Geological Society, in which case Twitter would be the meat in the sandwich. I guess there are many such cases (and many more can be expected.)

https://outline.com/T7kaPw :=: "Voters on the right half of the political spectrum have lately been given ample reason to wonder whether employees of giant Internet companies are also supporting their favorite causes at work."

20181107
(Just saying .. )

(.. something about restriction to freedom of (respectable) information and as balance to the political right ..) Yandex has had a block on this site too for many years. In the interest of anti-Putin hegemony you can help by putin' it around that Putin is (needlessly) sh^!-scared of an expanding Earth and that he'll be putin' up daisies long before anybody notices, so his paranoia is not justified.

("Consensus makes you free.") 

20181120

This is a collage of an image capture to show my infringement retrospective of 20181102 (the date of suspension), though they've only just appeared in the last few days.  Pretty severe as you can see, though they were well-intentioned. The density is typical. Included are not only others' images, but some of mine as well - some even OCR clips of search texts, and even one or two of my own literary inventions made as an image.  So it looks like it was an image infringement after all, a casualty of artificial intelligence of sorts (facial /image recognition), though with a heavy emphasis on exclusion of what I was trying to say.  I would have thought copyright Fair Use would cover every image posted, so I don't know what's going on (other than wanting a telephone number).  I don't have one (mobile) but did sign in already anyway to confirm identity. Made no difference. Pretty frightening (when you think through the implications /limitations of free speech) You'd think they could have put some flowers in the box too, .. daisies or something, to lighten it up a bit in the interest of overarching theme of tribal connectedness, instead of all-black. I feel like a piranha.  (Yeah, .. the other one too.)

20181123
(Google earth >searchbox > Palestine)
(.. And verymuchwithstanding) :-
https://tinyurl.com/yb29ner5
https://tinyurl.com/y9bsk75b


20181129
R&P  :=:   Just some thoughts on Rape And Pillage following the recent revelations re the bad behaviour of the Catholic Church, .. and now as the Royal Enquiry into the Banks finishes up (this week),  the bad behaviour of Big Business, Deaths in Custody, Domestic Violence, and calls now (since it all began) for an Integrity Commission to oversee bad behaviour on all fronts, - even Mother Teresa getting a guernsey for being the classic psychopath by inflicting God's will on the poor and the suffering, and how the public (as much as anything) get their heads around rationalising this sort of thing even to the point of relishing being part of it (being 'sold').  I.e., just something about the duality of life and death, .. that business of 'encoding' of the dna - in the bean and the seed and the chicken and the egg and death as our necessary lot, and even how day-to-day we must devour (eat and excrete) some other life in order to stay alive).  Weird life in a beautiful world, and how we must do better in it.  Yet strip away the water and the air and the light that underwrite it and what have we got?  Not a place any God would like to inhabit.  So what sort of a trick is this dna-chick playing on us? Today's new google image is for :- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolome_Esteban_Murillo  reminding us we're still pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, when things could be better.  

 (20181129)
(Appealing Twitter suspension)

To twitter

Dear Twitter,

I am a geologist attempting to communicate to the public an alternative view to Plate Tectonics (an established consensus *theory* ).  My posts have two purposes, 1. specifically to highlight the inadequacies of the theory (and axiomatically therefore to be controversial), and 2. (therefore) to be educational.  At no time were my posts ever abusive.

Plate Tectonics enjoys a monolithic consensus, and I suspect there may have been a complaint(s) from one or more professional bodies with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Such monolithic consensuses require indirect approaches.  Some may regard my efforts as 'unorthodox', and thereby take offence, even being thin-skinned to the point of interpreting them as abusive ('threatening'). 

Post deletions were initially all those to hash-tagged geological forums, followed by an almost indiscriminate blacking out of all posts with images used to make points. I did think suspension may have been judged on copyright infringement, but even before posting considered them all to fall within the bounds of "Fair Use".  (Even some of my own images were blanked out.)

No-one ever posted a reply contradicting the substance, or objecting to the tenor, of my posts.  I believe they may have tried to 'pull weight' by contacting you directly.

I would be grateful if you could inform me of the reason why there was such a heavy deletion of my posts.

Thank you.

Don Findlay
----------------------------------

(20181130)   -     Twitter account reinstated on appeal along with an offer of helping out with further questions if required.
--------------------------------

20181203

Dear Support,
 
Thank you for reinstating my account.  However, I'm still in the dark as to the reason for suspension in the first place, particularly since all images that I thought might have been the cause of the offence (and likewise some possible 'trigger' posts) appear to have been resumed.

I guess it falls within "Rules and Policies", which I have (again) read, and of which there are quite a number of areas of possible infringement.  But I have been posting for a couple of years and have not changed my 'style' - so I did find the suspension odd (and a little disturbing).

If you can give me a clue, even just loosely, what area was the cause of suspension it would be helpful, particularly if it was instigated by an external complaint by another user (re subject, substance or tone), or if it was strictly an in-house curtailment.

Thank you,
d.findlay


20181213
 No answer received to communication of 20181203

(Defining moment closed). 

===========================


20190120
resumed posting  
https://twitter.com/earthexpansion/status/1086437626863804416

20190204
Twitter account locked again. I tried to post this answer to Guardian Science about being "worried about climate change" :-
-------------
I'm not.
https://earthexpansion.blogspot.com/2017/02/climate-change.html#jcurve
https://tinyurl.com/y74gjxkv  (Thanks Anthony for this link)
------------
.. Then the locked page appeared the instant I clicked 'tweet'.  So I don't know if that got posted.  I have a feeling it might be locked because of this text-image I posted in the previous tweet..

.. justaposing it with one of erosion surfaces in the Himalyas, which denies Plate Tectonics' assertion of formation by "colliding plates" or "colliding continents" - and by further extrapolation leads to the conclusion that it is Plate Tectonics itself that is "Flat Earth" in another form - to which this site is drawing attention. 


 20190206
 (Appealing Twitter suspension - No.2)
  https://help.twitter.com/forms/general?subtopic=suspended

Dear Twitter,

It appears my account has been suspended for a second time (first time 20181102) (or perhaps 01/03 according to the international date-line.)

I refer to my earlier two correspondences explaining my situation :-
To the first (20181129) I got a reply and my account was shortly unlocked the same or the following day (thank you).

To the second however, asking why it was locked in the first place (in order that I might avoid this happening again), I did not get a reply.   For your convenience I enclose this as follows :-

==========================
20181203

Dear Support,

Thank you for reinstating my account.  However, I'm still in the dark as to the reason for suspension in the first place, particularly since all images that I thought might have been the cause of the offence (and likewise some possible 'trigger' posts) appear to have been resumed.

I guess it falls within "Rules and Policies", which I have (again) read, and of which there are quite a number of areas of possible infringement.  But I have been posting for a couple of years and have not changed my 'style' - so I did find the suspension odd (and a little disturbing).

If you can give me a clue, even just loosely, what area was the cause of suspension it would be helpful, particularly if it was instigated by an external complaint by another user (re subject, substance or tone), or if it was strictly an in-house curtailment.

Thank you,
d.findlay
===========================

To explain  further, I am a geologist (retired) with a lifetime in industry, and have published at the cutting edge of mineral exploration.  My posts are a serious attempt to bridge the gap between plate tectonics and Earth expansion, which immediately preceded the former, and to demonstrate a transition.

The fundamental differences may be summarised as :-
Earth expansion is predicated on geological *observation*.
Plate Tectonics is predicated on Geophysical *theory* (much of which is illogical, contradictory, and was initially designed specifically to deny what then (half-a-century ago) was the most seminal advance in Earth science - *ever.

Turf wars in academia can be lethal to whoever thinks they can challenge a consensus that is so ingrained and monolithic as Plate Tectonics.  Correspondingly, in virtually half a century there has been no discussion in academic circles of the merits of the two propositions.  Plate Tectonics has prevailed.

Therefore I am pitching my posts to the public in a way that reveals 'The Emperor's New Clothes', so to speak, in the hope that there are also be some on the academic side of the fence who may be responsive to my approach and find a way themselves to insinuate change.

I can well understand however, that suspension may be in response to (quoting Twitter) " behavior (that) violates 'Twitter Rules' or it may be in response to a *'valid and properly scoped'* request from an *'authorized entity in a given country'*.   https://tinyurl.com/y7u6txk5

I repeat (from my previous correspondence to you) that at no time in the two years I have been posting have my posts ever been abusive in any way, nor has anyone ever protested either the content or tone.

I do suspect therefore that your reason for suspension may be as asterisked just above, to which I would reply, "Then let anyone who protests my posts show cause by posting replies, rather than hiding behind the kudos of their institutions (and Twitter's platform.)

The evidence will soon show where the focus of concern lies, .. mine with public education and children, theirs with maintaining a monolithic consensus, and to secure the funding that such engineering guarantees.

Yours sincerely
d. findlay.

P.S.  I do not use a mobile phone.

--------------------

:-))  Same day,   Wednesday 6 February 2019 8:05PM :=:
 Right on cue about conspiracy theories  and Claiming the Earth is flat  (above image, 20190204 .. about "human evaluators trained in public guidelines"), and who has control of so-called 'truth'?  Only in Russia (and China) do people believe what their government tells them.  Isn't that so?  Trump in America?, .. you can believe everything he says because he tweets it.  And when he's not tweeting, words fall straight from his mouth.  Isn't *that so too?.  At least the words can be believed, if not what they're saying.

 At least science admits that making mistakes is the way it moves forward.  Science is always under scrutiny - or should be.  It's when there is a monolithic consensus about a *theory* (rather than about the facts) that we need to be concerned.  And Plate Tectonics freely represents itself as a theory, about which much is not understood. Why? (me :-) For the simple reason it is barking up the wrong tree by building its house on sand - making assumptions that are unwarranted.  Time for a cool change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIxvQMhttq4

---

Mountain1

So, .. what is a mountain?
( .. is a very good question.. )

---

.. And a very good answer (as well as them usually getting built out of molehills) is that it is a word weaponised by Plate Tectonics to mask wilful ignorance by subverting perceptions of scale and context, and turning sense of proportion into goo.  ["The most powerful lie is the lie of omission .." (=context) ~George Orwell]

(Image credits Google earth and Disney Pictures)

Fig.1.  Reading the runes.  Looking across the much degraded, incised landscape that once formed the essentially flat surface that now closely marks the summits of the MacKenzie Mountains (Canada.)

One look is all it takes to dismiss P.T. in an instant.

Now, .. it could be argued that it is a matter of scale and proportion. A little erosional mountain here and there, or a prominence that is mountain in name only, or one that is looked up to from down in the valley, .. or even (though it would be on shaky ground) the whole of the MacKenzie Mountains (image), is of no consequence.  BUT when *all* the mountains in the world are seen from Her Royal Highness's perspective, then a central and fundamental pillar of Plate Tectonics is being removed.

So, is she right, .. or being cute?

Whether she is or not, by referencing her view to the horizon and the increasingly apparent smoothness of the intervening rugged terrain in doing so, she is including a readily observable context that Plate Tectonics ignores - namely perspective and scale expressed by the incised planation surface from which the MacKenzie Mountains are carved.  And, by the way (and by a similar dynamical likeness), she is implying a likewise 'scaled' situation of flatness and smoothness for all the other incised planation surfaces in the world from which mountains are carved. By doing so she is drawing attention to a certain wilful blindness that Plate Tectonics demonstrates when strutting its duplicitous stuff.

When confronted with contretemps such as this Plate Tectonics might be expected to adopt an apologetic tone, but no, .. it merely ||coughs|| and says :-

"Well, you might be right about the horizon, erosion and all that, .. but there are different *types* of mountains .." [ five if I remember ] "It's true that some of them are formed by erosion, but others, .. the ones called "fold-mountains" that are said to be formed by colliding plates (and that's most of them) are not. When continents carried on plates "crash together" (link), elevated prominences are formed that stand high above the general terrain." (sumo) (other).

Now it is true that rocks are folded when they are compressed, and that we can see this in outcrop, and at local and regional scales too, so it is natural enough to think that large-scale buckling must be due to "crustal forces" acting in the 'plane' of  the Earth's crust, and that buckling will cause the crust to become locally elevated (as at the foot of a landslide).  However, crustal-scale buckling downwards is more difficult because there is resistance from crust that is already there, and there is also resistance due to Earth's curvature because a larger surface area is being pushed down into a (smaller) one. So buckling as a means of lifting up the crust is only half the story.) (The other half is a problem)

But buckled rock sequences do indeed occur over very large areas in sedimentary basins, and to very considerable depths in the crust, i.e. in regions where the crust has been extended or pulled apart, so there is no contradiction in having some regions that are folded and buckled upwards, paired with other regions that are depressed and filled with sediments.

But here's the crux, which makes this controversy so deliciously worth writing about (and I hope reading about too) :=: as everyone knows (ever since they were the same age as the Princess) the Earth is *ROUND* and not 'flat'; and this is something that (unless I have a whole lot of egg on my face), is something that seems to have escaped a worldful of experts in Earth science who still have to discover it ("for the first time") ("going forward").

Shadenfreude?  Maybe.  But I mean, .. who's kidding who?

O.k., so what's with this roundness then?  :-  "..What's roundness got to do ("got to do") with it?  What's  roundness but a useless observa.a.ation? "

Isn't the Earth flat?   Well, .. just simply this. When the crust collapses, and whether it is ice (/glacier) moving down a mountain slope, or the bullnose of a surface debris flow (/pediment) in mountainous terrain, or ductile creep deeper in the crust, the contour of its collapsing front is rounded (Fig.3).  Rounding is the signature architecture of gravitational collapse of a smaller (tighter) curvature sliding out over a larger (more open) one (that has been up on my old website for the last fifteen or so years, and that nobody seems to want to notice) (but does seem to be catching on) (but without any attribution of course). [Academia never credits anything other than that supporting its own particular point of view. (And the consensus supporting Plate Tectonics is monolithic).]

So maybe a little bit of shadenfreude is ok, .. y/n?

 

>Fig.3. The Svalbard fold(s)

Of course this loopy roundness is not always easy to see because of the scale on which it occurs, and because what is happening (/has happened) at depth can only be seen once it is exposed by erosion, but the princess (who is clever as well as beautiful), can see it when everyone else seems to have fallen into flat-trap acedia by not recognising the effect that gravity can have on the architecture of the Earth's surface.

Scale and context .. is the rabbit hole we have to go down in order to correct the errors of Plate Tectonics. When we do, it quickly becomes apparent that the only mountains that get "built" are volcanoes, and even these are easily argued to result from gravitational collapse (of ejected debris), which begs the question why does the Earth's interior keep pushing stuff *UP* (globally) (and not sideways) (and sea-level to fall - globally). Considering that over geological time two-thirds of the Earth's surface have been created in this UP-way, while the other one-third has been collapsing *down* to gravitationally correct for the changes in Earth's surface curvature, allows mankind to make another giant leap forward without even thinking about it, .. or even lifting feet off the ground, .. so we have to wonder (with the beautiful princess) what a worldful of experts have been thinking about for half a century, and how it happened that they managed to dig themselves into the hole they have.

So you can see how careful we have to be with words when it comes to their use and abuse when we don't use our heads. Even the simplest of them - like, 'mountain' and 'valley' can be our downfall, as we trundle along to where we think we are going.

.................

'Mountain building' is an excellent example of a meme being used to subvert common sense. It is *firmly* rooted in theory. It has *no* foundation in reality. And consensus is its *sole* validation. It derives *entirely* from a misapprehension of Earth's roundness and the importance of gravity in making the Earth "flatter-than-it-used-to-be" - i.e., changing its curvature.  It is, in effect, flat-Earth thinking in another form.

And I think that's a great big joke that children would just love to explore in the classroom - in pairs or foursomes. For a whole term.

Even though mountains (except for volcanoes) are manifestly artifacts of erosion this geological 'concatentation' /chant? of them being "built" (by "colliding" continents) (on "moving" plates) is a mantra that for more than half a century has remained an unshakeable barrier to making sense of global geology via the landforms that preface the formation of the so-called "mountain belts" of the world. By drawing attention to the importance of erosion the princess (who by the way has no intention of being lured up any mountain to be rescued) is firing the opening shot across the bows of the Big Ship that should have it ploughing those waves for that far horizon as fast as it can, so it can scuttle itself on a coral reef somewhere on some distant shore.

And has been for virtually the duration that Plate Tectonics has occupied the high ground.

Fig.3. A coral reef on some distant shore ?. (Just watch your feet when you get out of the boat. It's sharp.) [The exhumed shelf of the Upper Triassic dolomites, Italian Alps.]

Wilful

 Wilful Blindness  
( .. Folding results from gravity collapse, not colliding continents.  )

---

"To know or to delibately *not* know, :: Zat iz ze Qvestion, Vladimir." "Zigackly, Boris, .. 'hic!"

Fig.1.  'MEDICINE' :=: The sugar pill of Plate Tectonics, or the bitter truth of an Earth getting bigger.

The Challenge for Earth science is to make a choice - either to remain with the stale hash of contradictions that Plate Tectonics has served the Earth sciences with for the last half century (and unless something is done about it, looks like it might serve it for another half century), or to roll boldly forward where some have gone before and add to their achievement by saying that not only is the Earth round, rotating and orbiting the sun, but that it is also getting bigger. What could be simpler, .. round, rotating, orbiting the Sun - and getting bigger .. .. (?)

..And flatter. The  Earth keeps getting flatter than it used to be. When are those two geezers on the park bench going to waken up? (We might well ask. ..)

The mustard is cut. The Big Ship is turning.

Sundry

20181004 (Trump's reported "mocking"  
watched on youtube) https://tinyurl.com/y8r2hlqm

He challenged her on her facts, and actually (thereby) adds fuel to her fire, when he should have targeted her emotional manipulation. Apart from managing to escape (@5:50mins) through a locked door (@4:05mins), her complaining about a teenage romp with a couple of drunken louts at a pool party (the one-piece bathing suit under the clothes - though she couldn't remember a venue - possibly because there were many at the time in her circle) who were a year or so older than her and one of whom was drunk enough to fall off the bed (which for me added a light touch to what sounded more like a comic romp than anything else) and classifying it as "sexual assault /violence", is an affront to women who have to live with it every day of their lives. 

Well, true or not, if it goes down she has to be ticketed as someone who knows exactly how to pull the emotional strings of others.  I noticed that throughout the narrative there was no attempt at all to collect herself once the bedroom scene was told. If the appropriate response to the memory of an event some thirty-odd years ago is more serious than just dinner-table bemusement, then the woman is maybe getting confused with other more serious (and hidden /forgotten /projected /unresolved) issues. What sort of paragons of virtue do people want to represent them to sit in judgement of their peers anyway (her Central Point in speaking out, by the way - not the assault itself, and somewhat cleverly displaced in the narrative) (and very much a questionable motive, especially for a psychologist).  You would have thought she would have been able to demarcate the two a bit better, given the global venue.  It's not the woman who's screwed up in my opinion, it's all those who are buying it.

And therein may lie the next big subterrannean story to come out of the woodwork as all the witches in the forest congregate under the full moon and lather themselves with all sorts of 'men' issues, .. though it has to be said (since we're saying), that men have much to answer for in the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost when it comes to all sorts of things - like not opening their mail, .. or taking the bin out when they should ('coz nobody else will), .. or mansplaining, .. or .. ..

In the world of back then 'Chinatown', was a different place.

Same time, same place (Chinatown) :=:  I Watched it last night. Very strange the way that things conspire to punctuate life with meaning.  Here's Jack getting a few clues and reflecting on teenage years. The waitress by the way *does* respond with appropriate indignation - but we do wonder what she might have to say in fond reflection thirty-five years later.  [Film Chinatown, director Roman Polanski with :-  Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunnaway, a codger, .. and an elderly waitress copping a complimentary feel.]

By extension of this 'vignette' on political life however, and what is *truly* disturbing, is the insidious and pervasive fashionable adoption of vocal fry, up-speak (/up-squeak, /up-squeal)  as a vocal badge of societal 'connectedness', particularly by women .  It has deliberate infantile appeal that subverts even further the transition from adolescence to adulthood (and responsibility) that seems to have stuttered to a halt at a time when ínstitutional 'bad behaviour' is rife. There is a lack of sense-of-proportion in many things that reflect an inversion of common sense, and that is hidden in the words used, e.g., "political correctness" - a semantic displacement for deliberately confusing the relationship of the individual to the group in order to exert control. Reversal of the world to the self (rather than the self to the world) (which former defines the psychopath) is a balance that seems currently to be very seriously out of kilter, greatly helped by Social Media and 'Fake' News (remembering that the colours flying from the ship today are, more than ever, no guarantee of authenticity or veracity.)

"We live in interesting times .."

[Added 20181011] 
 Christine Blasey Ford   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFL6k5yOAFM
 Jordan Peterson on Free speech and the right to offend  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44pERGAaKHw

She sells sea shells ..

Two thousand years of Pilgrims progressing?
( .. "the Earth is flat and that's that" .. )

---

(From the archives)
 

A seat in the front row - and a contemplative mo. 

Sunset. There's just something about it, isn't there?  Especially when we see it from some westwards vantage overlooking the sea, and pause to consider that yet another day of our allotted three-score-and-ten has, with the setting of the sun, sunk beneath the waves.

Breathtaking in its beauty, magisterial in its command over all earthly things, the sun descends to our line of sight and reminds us once more of our impermanence and the cold night that follows its beneficence as the giver of life, and we are further minded to dwell on the unknowable that is at once magical, mysterious and portentous.  But night is encroaching and there's a bus to catch, we have to go home, and do (whatever) all over again the next day.

And so these ephemera of the mind, sisters two - inscrutable mystery (with her hair up) and existential mundanity (with her hair down) - set with the sun.
 
But up-and-down, in-and-out, back-and-forth, over time we're getting there, .. working it out, often by reinventing the wheel as we back-track to undo the errors that were first thought to be 'progress'. The world turns and the sun sets, and the cold, cold nights of encroaching destiny are shoving plates of crust down the gurgler, causing  (as S.W. Carey once said), the Pacific to disappear up (/down)  it's own "Rim of Fire".

  

"But the notion of a spreading ridge crabbing obliquely down its own subduction sink   under California, while continuing to excrete towards the Pacific but swallow from the   Atlantic; is as hallucinatory as a maw vanishing into its own anus, or really the reverse, if   that is any easier to conceive."  (1976, Expanding Earth, p.57)

So the world turns and the sun sets.  There is even a rate of exchange for gurgling as night falls and the Earth gets cold.

However 'modern' we might consider ourselves to be we should not assume that we are any more mindful than those who have gone before. Indeed it is by their collective efforts that we are where we are today, but denied a window to the future we cannot see where the endeavours of past and present will lead. And certainly we should not assume that any 'advance' is necessarily towards veracity or benefit.  Though it might seem so at the time, history tells us that otherwise is often the case.

And in a very considerable way this is where understanding of our world begins, with interrogating those terrestrial elements in the picture - Earth, sun, sea and sky of which we ourselves are made - Earth, both above and below the sea, with its hills and mountains, plains and strands and all growing /living things that either eat or are eaten, .. the sea itself (water, the giver of life), and the air we breath - the three foundations to our understanding of our immediate environment), which, tellingly, we now call 'spheres' when obviously the Earth is flat (well it is, .. isn't it?). (twitink to round earth).

'Tellingly', ..because it is in the transition of our perceptions of scale, of flatness to curvedness, wherein lies the key to understanding the geological history of the Earth.

More than two thousand years ago the Greeks discerned the spherical shape of the Earth and that the flatness apparent in the picture above was an illusion of scale, but more than two thousand years later there are still people who (it is said) are impervious to logic,  and believe the Earth to be as flat as they see it.   And they do make a good point - which is that skepticism is, or should be (regretfully it seems no longer to be so) the essence of science, raising the question where, exactly, do we draw the line between believing what others in supposed intellectual authority tell us, and what our own common sense tells us? Surely scepticism can be taken to extremes.  But it is the extreme that makes the point :-  

" In an age where ­astronauts send photographs of a spherical planet from an orbiting space station, how can the concept of a flat Earth persist? Shenton says, "Look at what special effects are capable of: you can produce any photograph, any video. I don't think there is solid proof. I'm not intentionally being stubborn about it, but I feel our senses tell us these things, and it would take an extraordinarily level of evidence to counteract those. How many people have actually investigated it? Have you?" [Good question? How much do we unquestioningly take on authority? d.f.] Zeteticism, Shenton says, emphasises experience and reason over the ­"trusting acceptance of dogma" – or, it seems, overwhelming evidence. Only a personal trip into space to see the world as it is for himself would persuade him. "But even then, in seeing it, I would have to be convinced there weren't any tricks involved." [ David Adam, The Guardian, Wednesday 24 February 2010 09.39 AEST]

Flat-Earthers are usually the butt of ridicule (Link), but intentionally or not Shenton is actually drawing attention to a malaise that is more pervasive in society than is healthy.  For if we cannot trust the leaders of our various institutions to tell it like it is, then we're on our way to hell in a handbasket.  And confidence in our institutional leaders is not high for the simple reason that 'telling it like it is', is regarded as a hindrance, certainly not a priority.  Too often, unfortunately, the priority is the power that high office offers to those who seek it.  We can easily judge their caliber by their propensity for spin, slogans and management-speak, and we would hope that this might be an obvious disqualification, but almost universally it seems that those who excel in this come to be preferred candidates, aided by others who would exploit the darker side of social cohesion [group-think and mob-mentality].  Thus there is a broader indictment that reflects on those who would elect them.   Shenton is simply illustrating what happens when we get a clue that our trust is being abused and scepticism overwhelms logic and reason, and there is a serious disconnect.  If this happens in a community then it becomes pervaded by the inverse of those values that should hold it together.  No need to spell them out.

Fossils origins.  If two thousand years ago the Greeks could deduce a round Earth, and who else before them may also have (but for one reason or another were not able to enclose their findings in the pages of history) it seems hardly likely they would be stumped by the ordinary commonsense reasoning anyone could exercise to explain fossils simply by walking along a beach and witnessing the carnage of carcasses and skeletons of sea animals in the sand, and the clear correspondence with fossils in the sandstone cliffs behind, or further inland.  

And of course the ancient Greeks were not stumped.    W.N. Edwards writes, ..

" Among the Greeks at about the same time there were at any rate some who have grasped the true nature of fossils.  Thus in the sixth century BC Xenophanes is said to have observed impressions of small fishes in the rocks of Paros, and marine shells on inland mountains.  Pythagoras (according to Ovid) and Xanthus of Sardis are also reported to have accepted the occurrence of these shells as an indication that the mountains were at one time under the sea.  There is a well-known passage on the same subject in Herodotus, who observed marine shells in Egypt and concluded that they had been left there by the sea. "

Yet for the following centuries :-

".. The common-sense views of Herodotus and others were replaced by fantastic and mystical explanations of all sorts.  For some ten centuries there is indeed little to record concerning fossils.  The barren disputes of the Schoolmen, and the strange hypotheses founded on current dogmatic theology, then occupied the field for several hundred years, and not until the end of the seventeenth century was the battle over the origin of fossils really won.  "Instead of solid and experimental philosophy," wrote Henry Power in 1663, "it has been held accomplishment enough to graduate a student if he could but stiffly wrangle out a vexatious dispute of some old peripatetic qualities, or the like, which (if translated into English)  signified no more than a heat 'twixt two oyster wives in Billingsgate."  [W.N. Edwards, The early history of palaeontology.p.1,  British Museum of Natural History,  London 1967; 2nd edition (1976) - originated as a guide to a temporary exhibit in 1931.]

And from China in the year ~ ` 527A.D. :-

"At Stone-Fish Mountain in Hsiang-Hsiang Hsien there is a lot of non-magnetic iron ore (hsian shih).  It is dark in colour and veined like mica.  If you split open the outer layer there are always shapes of fishes inside, with scales and fins, heads and tails, just as if they were carved or painted.  They are several inches long, and their details are perfect.  If burnt they will even give off a fishy smell."  .. [Li Tao-Yuan (?-527), Shui Ching Chu, Chapter 38, p.3a)

For an example of this dichotomy of the mind, the medieval notions of fossils are particularly instructive because they illustrate, first sight at least, how skewed simple and ordinary logic can become. However it seems (to me at least) hardly likely that the purveyors of such fantastical 'views' as those described later during the Middle Ages [e.g., Edwards reference above] were serious, but if they were, then possibly those views may be read as much as anything as attempts to remain within the religio-political mores of the time. 

Reading such accounts for a second time  - of "sports of nature" caused by "plastic forces and formative virtues" and "seminal auras' within the Earth - leads one to consider if a code of sorts was being employed to subvert the inquisitorial intentions of the Catholic Church.  Given the creepy treatment that Galileo endured at the hands of the Church it is highly possible that science, being forced underground, might have been resorting to tactics similar to those used in more recent times by the Arts in the former Soviet Union where doublespeak was employed to communicate views that clearly contravened the Church's (Religionism or Communism) views and could earn the death penalty.  Either that or they were perhaps the views of 'willing idiots', being voiced to gain favour with more powerful interests.  Even such as getting a job in a school?  Maybe.  

 It hardly seems likely that people with an ounce of common sense could ignore the obvious when a simple walk along a beach would tell all that was necessary of fossil origins, and had been spelt out centuries before by the Greeks.  How hard was it then to make the connection between sands of the beach and the shells buried them,  and the stony shells that were buried in the sandstone beds that formed the adjacent shore?  Lithifaction, whatever words are used to describe it ('fluxing salts', 'plastic virtues', 'seminal auras'), is still lithifaction.  But in the face of possible denouncement by friends and neighbours it may be no wonder that a person might feign fantastic views if he thought they gained favour with standard religious ones.   The Church (both scientific and religious) has a lot to answer for when it comes to holding up progress in science, particularly for its influence on the malleable mind of youth and its consequently neutered adult one.  

The social media hype of today evidences a powerful need to belong, and with that comes, for some,  a license to want to be seen to belong more than others. Can we wonder, then, at the inventiveness of some explanations for something that seems virtually self-evident? Though with "failed seeds of life", and reasoning such as (quote from Edwards cited above) :-

" Eduard Lhuyd (1660-1709)  maintained .. "that fossils developed from "moist seed-bearing vapours" which rose from the sea and penetrated the earth, perhaps carried down by rain."

...  we do have to wonder at the relative importance of artificial device over genuine dopeyness - or the role played by bandwagoners hoping for limelight. However we must remember too that times change and that a written opinion then may have meant something quite different from one of today.  Were Moses alive today, would his commandments carry the same weight if disseminated by email?  Or what if he put an entry in the personal column of the evening newspaper?  I think not.  There has been an irreversible shift in communication by the media available to us - "the medium is the message" and all that - and we are not entitled to make judgements on any 'outlandish media-evil views' when we fail to account for context and intent coloured by social mores of the time.

I guess we'll never know exactly how to read those views.  But one thing is certain - the minds that invented them - if they got to writing them down the way they did - were no different in their intellectual capacity from those that write today.  In fact given the hurdle of challenges to actually do that - commit word to paper in the cold and darkness of winter - they were probably substantially superior, or at least more driven.  

Mountains.  In conclusion and to further illustrate the point (of the 'then-and-now' similarites and the things that get in the way) this quotation, also from Edwards, seems particularly apposite. : -

"Concerning mountains and the fossils found in them, Avicenna [980-1037A.D.] writes :- Mountains may be due to two different causes.  Either they are effects of upheavals of the crust of the earth, such as might occur during a violent earthquake, or they are the effect of water, which, cutting for itself a new route, has denuded the valleys, the strata being of different kinds, some soft, soft hard.  The winds and waters disintegrate the one, but leave the other intact.  Most of the eminences of the earth have had this latter origin.  It would require a long period of time for all such changes to be accomplished, during which the mountains themselves might be somewhat diminished in size.  But that water has been the main cause of these effects is proved by the existence of fossil remains of aquatic and other animals on many mountains." (From A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, by J.W. Draper, who does not state the exact source of the quotation.) "

A thousand years ago?  I don't think it is said any better today.  The Church of course appropriated fossils as evidence for The Flood, thereby imbuing common sense with a superfluous religiosity (and Plate Tectonics speaks in tongues of "colliding plates") but I guess we could say that water such as constitutes the oceans of the Earth *is* very much a flood of sorts. It just didn't happen in Moses' time - whenever that was, given that the Moses Story was handed down by word of mouth until the old testament was committed to paper (/papyrus).

The Flood :-   is not a theological issue - it is simply a question of dates. Walking the beach and doing the sunset thing goes back to antiquity.  Writing it down in the fifth and sixth centuries BC utilised the then existing technology to create a record.  An Old Testament some three hundred years later and a new post-Jesus Christ one speaks for itself as regards Johnnies-come-lately :-:  fossils representing the remains of animal life preserved in cemented beach material by some sort of "plastic salty virtues" in rocks that all around the Mediterranean were flat-as-a-tack and hardly differentiated from the beach material itself, .. well, .. lithifaction would have been virtually tacit knowledge long before the writing down of any old testament that these were the remains of sea animals that once lived, and, in a curious way, give a clue to the essence of life. Religion has no copyright whatsoever on common sense, and we should beware of anyone who speaks in tongues to (dis-)colour reality (including government) (and much of  Earth science too). .

Any religious canon talking about Earth Sea and Sky and the creation of All Living Things would naturally have incorporated such-like common-sense lore as best it could ..

"She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore .. " [.. even children .. .. .. ]

.. though giving emphasis of course to the theological, rather than geological, intent in the writing.  In other words, the natural origin of fossils even then would have been tacit knowledge regardless of religious texts written afterwards attributing them to some heeby-jeeby jumbo-mumbo.  Of course the land was flooded.  Its littoral margins still are.  It's not a theological issue, .. probably wasn't then either.  It's just a beat up by the 'Shentons' who prefer to adhere to their own religious version of the world, rather than common sense.

.......................
 
Religion is comforting, where common sense can be greatly disturbing, particularly when it hits on a truth with implications for other truths in a domino-like chain reaction.  Avoid both and be your own person.  Make it up as you go and why not 'cos everybody else does - merchants of spin and management speakers - rolling it out and going forward, working towards something that you can bet your bottom dollar has nothing to do with you.
.......................

And so, by a series of retrospectives and fast-forwards we have travelled to the Greece of two-and-a-half thousand years ago and back again - twice, .. once to juxtapose the recorded origins of roundness of the Earth with today's flat-Earth believers (and thereby to highlight the importance of scepticism in science), .. then again to juxtapose the ancient but commonsensical and right view of the origin of fossils with the peculiar but much later views of the Middle Ages - probably skewed by an Inquisitorial Church.  And finally ending with fossils again, getting a forty-days and forty-nights beat-up by The Biblical Flood.  Along the way we have also noted the views of a thousand years ago on mountains being no different from those of today.  [So much for two thousand years of progress in thinking - or observing.]

Thus we have highlighted :-  That just as the Catholic Church sought to skew the common sense of the biological origins of fossils towards the great big jumbo-mumbo of  "The Flood", geophysics has sought to skew geological reality by conflating earthquakes, the faults they represent and the destruction wreaked when they happen,  with "slab strength"  in order to introduce what has become the dogma of  "The New Global Tectonics".

Where will it all end?

( Who knows.  We haven't even started yet. )
--->

With Earth expansion, that's where, when the slabs of subduction zones are discarded and the Wadati-Benioff zone is reinstated as Benioff originally had it - as a great big MOAF - (Mother Of All Faults), .. the one dislocating the continental lithosphere from the asthenosphere - in a hugely extensional way.

[There are probably a few views here I might take issue with myself tomorrow, so don't hold me to them.]

".. The Earth is flat - and that's that. .."