I saw this on the SMBC website relatively recently. Let's see...here it is.

A lot of people are mentioning the Earth's atmosphere here, and it just isn't that big of a factor for sizable impactors over history. Yes, it keeps dust-sized particles from making a constant stream of micro-craters, and stops the fist-sized rocks from making small craters, but even Venus with 90 times Earth's atmosphere doesn't stop any craters bigger than about 2 km from being formed.

Okay, we wouldn't be seeing many craters bigger than the atmospheric cutoff being formed today because the influx of such objects is currently very small, but if we could have had the protection of our atmosphere while somehow turning off erosion/volcanism/tectonism for the past 4.5 billion years, then we would look (from a distance) as cratered as the Moon does--only when looking at small scales would we notice the difference.

I talk about this series up above, and yes, Dumas was paid by the line. (Not unusual for the time, Dickens was similarly paid by the word.)

It's worth noting that Dumas was paid by the line, giving him a reason to expand his dialogue a bit.

A lovely set of fantasy novels done as a Dumas pastiche are the Khaavren romances by Steven Brust. The Phoenix Guards corresponds to The Three Musketeers, Five Hundred Years After corresponds to Twenty Years After, etc. I haven't found The Baron of Magister Valley yet, but I'm told it corresponds to The Count of Monte Cristo.

One of the interesting things here is that these books are set in the world of the Dragaeran Empire, a setting where Brust has been writing his long-running Vladimir Taltos series for decades and which, um, do *not* share that writing style (these books have been described as being written in "first person smartass"). The Khaavren romances are supposed to be historical novels which exist in the world (and approximate time) of the Taltos books.

Brust *loves* playing around with structure and voice and the like. One book in the Taltos series, which revolves around characters from the two series interacting, is divided into three parts, with the first part written in the Taltos voice and the third part written in the Khaavren voice. It's really odd "hearing" these characters speak in the other style.

I'd heard that there was a find of something that could reasonably have been the lake of wine. Trying to google on it, I end up getting directed to Wikipedia, but I guess it boils down to an artificial pond/lake that doesn't seem to have been used for drinking water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Terrace_Pavilion

There are numerous lessons that could be learned here.

1. Scientists are human beings and, hence, fallible. Presented with an idea this much at odds with current understanding, they resorted to ad hominem attacks.

2. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This was a big change to current understanding, and the initially proposed mechanisms simply did not work.

3. The process did eventually work. The evidence collected by Wegener remained in the record and when additional evidence (that helped explain the mechanism) was discovered, the opinion of the scientific community began to change.

While there have been "crackpot" ideas eventually proved correct, there have been many more that remained utterly unfounded. When presented with an idea that defies the current consensus, look at *why* it disagrees with the consensus and see what it would take for it to be correct.