QQC#4- Chapters 5 & 6

He sent the tooth to Cuvier in Paris for an opinion, but the great Frenchman dismissed it as being from a hippopotamus. (Cuvier later apologized handsomely for his uncharacteristic error.) One day while doing research at the Hunterian Museum in London, Mantell fell into conversation with a fellow researcher who told him the tooth looked very like those of animals he had been studying, South American iguanas. A hasty comparison confirmed the resemblance. And so Mantell's creature became Iguanodon, after a basking tropical lizard to which it was not in any manner related.

This quote stands out to me because of the sheer stupidity of the people involved. First, the guy who said it looked like a hippopotamus tooth. I haven't seen hippo teeth but there is no way a tooth like that could be mistaken for a hippo tooth. Chances are the guy took one glance at it, said "I'm not wasting my time with this" and told the guy the first thing off the top of his head to get him off of his back. Then comes the guy who said it looked like an iguana. Okay, this is slightly more believable, but you'd think that they would run more than just a hasty comparison before they determine something of that scale in the history of our own planet and the species that walked it. It seems to me like they just wanted to get something out there, and put as little effort into it as humanly possible while doing so...

QQC#3- Chapter 4

Jean Chappe spent months traveling to Sibera by coach, boat, and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements.

In 1781 Herschel became the first person in the modern era to discover a planet. He wanted to call it George, after the British monarch, but was overruled. Instead it became Uranus.

In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.

I have three quotes today, simply because I found them hilarious. Continually in the passage, people were discovering everything except what they were looking for (contour lines, for instance), but these ones are just hilarious in the sense that they stood out to me and were just epically amazing. The first one is complete epic fail for the poor scientist, who works so hard to do everything right, only to fail in the last stretch and be lucky to escape with his life. (That was nothing compared to the fellow who was declared dead, though!) The second one was just plain funny - George seems like such an odd name for a planet, and thinking that it was almost named that instead of Uranus is just weird (although, Uranus is a weird name too). And finally, the last one... well, it just seems like common knowledge now, what with eyebrows being hair and removable like any other factor of hair. But I find it funny that he learned about eyebrows being removable due to them exploding.

I don't really have any questions for this part of the reading- I just find it strange that people behaved in this way not that long ago. Okay, it was the 1700's, but I mean, did they really believe that a guy pointing something at the sky would bring an increase in rain? It just seems so far-fetched nowadays that people would believe an increase in rain could be brought about by some guy pointing things at the air...