[Rockhounds] Another extinction impact-13 KYA

[Mr EMan]

Regarding conflicting facts such as diamond variations etc.

 I've come to treat any "conflicting information" in a news article written by a staff writer, about any scientific topic, as more likely a failure of the staff writer to understand and correctly report what they have heard. We have no way of knowing what the briefer actually told them and how much of the details were scrambled up a little.

  I know when I try to explain a scientific concepts to the average layman, I use similar concepts they might be familiar with to compare or contrast the facts at hand.  I think most professors would do the same.

Eman

--- On Sat, 1/3/09, DonH <donhalterman at verizon.net> wrote:
The information in my last post is still valid--in literal terms, a "six-sided diamond" would be a cubic (hexahedral) diamond.  However, Pete's introduction of lonsdaleite in the subsequent post brought some doubt about the terms being used; in other words, is the author referring to a relative of diamond with a hexagonal unit cell (i.e. lonsdaleite), and then translating that incorrectly as a "six-sided diamond?"  In today's environment of science-as-entertainment and science-as-politics, anything is possible.

However, there is no debate that lonsdaleite is NOT diamond, just as stishovite and coesite are NOT quartz.

Don


--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
---