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Happy Thought for 28 March 2025

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Ha ve a Happy Tho ught:     Does anyone remember when a Department of Transportation was warning people about a partial road closure by telling people there was a “large boulder the size of a small boulder” on the road?     Image: screen capture of Twitter post from January 2020     So, this is actually an issue of crossing common (or “colloquial” if you want to be fancy) usage with technical usage of the word “boulder ”. You see, most of us humans see a large enough rock and think “boulder ”, until it gets even larger and it probably gets to “hill” size.     Geologists, though, need to be a bit more precise, and so have fully defined grain sizes from eensy (not a technical term) all the way to ginorm ous (again, non-technical).     T o a geologist, a “boulder” is anywhere from 0.25 to 4 meters in length / diameter. So that boulde r shown in the picture above? Yeah , that’s on the larger size of this “boulder” class of particles....