geology, language, uniformitarianism, epochs, et al.

Posted on 09 March 2025 by andyrew 2 min

I woke to a bespoke Sunday morning, and I found myself in a Spring-Forward state of mind.

With morning coffee,
I awoke to my two cats.
My thoughts exploded.

As I was viewing New Posts on Metafilter, and I came-across a sharing by Kattullus:

“still sleeping underground and had not yet spoken”

My tangents started here:

Beyond Mesopotamia: Tom Stevenson on the deciphering of Linear Elamite

I don't know what the cusp was, exactly, but I soon found myself here:

List of Sinkholes

Chichen Itza

Which led me to:

Earth Impact Database

Chicxulub Crater

Timeline of Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event research

Clovis Culture

{I spent a lot of time on sub-sub-tangents, as I have always been an avid hunter of fossils, and I spent an inordinate amount of time researching important fossil/paleontological location/references}

Somehow, I ended-up here:

Uniformitarianism

And I had the answer to one of my kiddo's questions in the Environmental Science Coursework we have been sharing!

I learned about the "Father of Modern Geology,":

James Hutton

John Playfair later recalled that...

"the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time" 1

...and Hutton concluded a 1788 paper he presented at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, later rewritten as a book, with the phrase:

"we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end" 2

Photo courtesy of André Cortesão

Photo courtesy of André Cortesão

As Stevenson writes in the aforementioned linked article:

Devotion for divine favour

Sitting here--writing this--I found myself deciphering the language and understanding of being an Educator, gradually revealing the Codex of Engagement.

With these thoughts in mind, I now find that I have created a whole series of Lesson Plans for my kiddos . . . with no vestige of a beginning, and no prospect of an end!


  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism#cite_note-Playfair_RSE-20 ↩︎

  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism#cite_note-KS_Thomson-21 ↩︎