It Did Blow Me Away Though

Those hardy little lichens don't just survive on bare rock—they thrive on it. While the rest of nature's buffet line is saying "no thanks," these pioneer species are practically salivating at the sight of naked geology. Ecological succession has to start somewhere, and these organisms are nature's equivalent of that friend who genuinely enjoys setting up before the party. They break down rock, create soil, and pave the way for everyone else while thinking, "This isn't hardship—this is gourmet dining!"

The ultimate alchemist's dream! "Fe" is iron and "S" is sulfur on the periodic table, and when combined as FeS₂, you get pyrite—aka "fool's gold." It looks like gold but it's chemically worthless compared to actual gold. The stonks meme guy is basically saying "I've turned worthless elements into something that LOOKS valuable and tricked everyone!" It's medieval chemistry meets modern finance fraud! The perfect scheme until someone with basic mineral knowledge shows up to your gold rush and ruins everything with actual science.

Ever wondered if you could taste science? This hilarious guide breaks down which scientific disciplines you should (or definitely should NOT) lick! Chemistry's emphatic "NO!!!!!" is spot on because, well, acids and bases aren't exactly tongue-friendly. Herpetology's "bad plan BAD PLAN" had me crying—imagine licking a venomous snake for science! 😂 The zoology entry flips the script brilliantly: "In zoology, science licks YOU." Meanwhile, epidemiology's desperate plea "FOR THE SAKE OF THE WORLD PLEASE DO NOT" feels especially relevant after recent years! Computer scientists apparently debug with their tongues—who knew that's what the 9V battery test was really training us for? My favorite might be geology's honest assessment: "Sometimes needed. Sometimes dangerous." Rock identification does occasionally involve the tongue test (for certain minerals), but licking uranium? Hard pass!

Behold, the classic corporate "spot the difference" game, except with climate science. Natural climate change: glacially slow. Human-caused climate change: speed-running planetary transformation in just 200 years. Yet somehow climate deniers look at these two completely different processes and declare them identical. It's like comparing continental drift to a demolition derby and saying "same energy." The rate of change is the entire point, but sure, let's pretend geological timescales and industrial timescales are twins separated at birth.

The tour guide just casually dropping that he's been working at the museum for 6 years with the precision of a geologic timescale! Paleontologists spend decades meticulously dating fossils using radiometric techniques and complex stratigraphic analysis, and this guy's like "eh, just add my employment duration to the Cretaceous period." The beautiful part is that technically he's not wrong - the T. rex is 70,000,006 years old now. His dedication to factual accuracy would make any scientist proud, even if his methodology is... questionable at best.

The eternal scientific naming divide! Geologists get to name minerals after towns (Cummingtonite is legit named after Cummington, Massachusetts) or whatever sounds cool that day. Meanwhile, chemists are stuck with IUPAC's rigid naming conventions that turn simple compounds into tongue-twisters like "2,4,6-trinitrotoluene" instead of just "the boom-boom stuff." The freedom gap between rock namers and molecule namers is the scientific community's greatest inequality.