Thursday, February 17, 2005

Doughy Pantload, lowering the bar yet again.


Apparently, there's nothing so stupid that Jonah Goldberg won't say it. Like
here:

Okay, in the grand spirit of airborne-laser-volcano-lancing, I would like to ask why we don't have really cool underground drilling vehicles -- a la Journey to the Center of the Earth ...

Gee, could it be because they didn't have a drilling machine in that book/movie? Stupid putz. But, eventually, someone actually tries to educate Goldberg in simple geophysics (oh, yeah, that's going to take hold):

OKAY ALREADY [Jonah Goldberg]

More email like this keeps pouring in:

Jonah,

The answer is the same as why we don't have nuclear attack submarines that can sail two miles below the surface of the Pacific - pressure increases with depth. In rock, both pressure and HEAT increase with depth. Get in touch with someone from the American Petroleum Institute and ask them what the temperature and pressure is at some of the lower wells drilled in the Anadarko Basin - it'll astound you. Rock at that temperature is 'elastic' - it will actually flow. At a depth of between 8 and 40 miles, it's a thick semi-liquid mass that's in slow but constant movement (that's why, when the Indus plate slipped down under the Burma plate, it will eventually cause the earthquakes on the backbone of Sumatra to erupt - an eddy current will form, increasing the heat in a narrow zone along the new bottom edge of the subducted plate - ask a geophysicist or geomorphologist).

Oh, yeah, Goldberg's going to drop everything he's doing and find himself a geomorphologist so he can stop making a total dick of himself. Sure, that can happen. And I should be getting that phone call from Angelina Jolie any minute now. Yessir, any minute now ...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting. I blogged on that as well.

I'm surprised that more people didn't pick up on the quote.

Looking over some of his quotes from the last few years, I see he's got a strong bent of anti-intellectualism. He seems to believe that you don't need to actually know something about a subject before you pontificate on it.