TL;DR: Screw academics who redefine a colloquial term then act like
everyone in the public is stupid for not using their stringent
neodefinition:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1155/pterosaurs-arent-considered-true-dinosaurs-why-not
PS it's totally different when I make a distinction between "font" and "typeface". That's serious.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1155/pterosaurs-arent-considered-true-dinosaurs-why-not
PS it's totally different when I make a distinction between "font" and "typeface". That's serious.
agreed ...
and tks for this funny and clearing ref., now I can more easely explain the confusion to my own kid when going to the museum.
Paleonthology is a great science for this, as it's so young, it's also so easy to show how the scientific process is prone to errors and sociological effects. Here in bxl we have the chance to have an historical room with some reconstitution of the discovery of a herd of iguanodon during the 19th century, in a coal mine, with technology at hand at the time. Its nice to show how we are small facing both nature and knowledge aquisition. (we are still comparing bones by hands and drawings ...)
Nathan Willis likes this.
If you -- or anyone -- ever visit Oxford, I highly recommend
visiting the Pitt-Rivers Museum, which is an anthropological musuem
dedicated to a wildly inaccurate theory about how technology and
craftsmanship evolves.
Still a great and informative collection, but the research that the founder put into it is -- while thorough -- totally wrong. It makes for a fascinating look at how we present history and our present understanding of science.
Still a great and informative collection, but the research that the founder put into it is -- while thorough -- totally wrong. It makes for a fascinating look at how we present history and our present understanding of science.