{"id":3082,"date":"2007-03-22T04:00:30","date_gmt":"2007-03-22T04:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/2007\/03\/yet-more-evidence-that-i-dont-understand-americans\/"},"modified":"2012-06-15T19:53:24","modified_gmt":"2012-06-16T00:53:24","slug":"yet-more-evidence-that-i-dont-understand-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/2007\/03\/yet-more-evidence-that-i-dont-understand-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"Yet more evidence that I don’t understand Americans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Would you believe that up until last week, I hadn’t heard of this whole March Madness palava? Hence the lack of real comment on the Science Spring Showdown<\/a> – I was basically having an ‘Englishman in New York’ moment until a handy North American explained the whole concept to me. So no, I wasn’t sulking because Plate Tectonics failed to qualify – although I had high hopes, it seems that only being able to move across court at a few millimetres per year is still a serious handicap. Maybe they should import Io<\/a> for a bit more dynamism.<\/p>\n

Anyway, now that I’ve been clued in, I can start doing all the annoying enthusiastic newbie things like cheering at inappropriate moments and asking dumb questions like ‘why doesn’t he just kick it?’ and ‘isn’t that offside?’. Without any geological contenders to root for, I’m placing all my hopes and dreams in the d-orbital, the source of all decent magnetism, and it’s been nice to see them making steady<\/a> progress<\/a> through the Mortar and Pestle Bracket to reach the ‘Sweet Sixteen’. The upcoming game with acid could be a nail-eater, though.<\/p>\n

I was also rooting for plucky Pluto in the Chair bracket, but sadly they were vanquished by Theory<\/a>. I just wish I could understand those American commentators and find out how they pulled it off… maybe Theory managed to formulate a description of solar system formation which definitively relegated the crowd favourite from the planetary table. If so, I suspect dirty tricks by the previously defeated IAU<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Looking over the other impending match-ups, I just look at the Invertebrates and get the feeling that any of the other Home Nations get when England are playing: the irresistible urge to root for the other side. Go Photosynthesis! But I think the real pick of the next round could be Phylogenetics vs HIV. Can the tree-builders match the AIDS virus’ legendary mutation rate?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Would you believe that up until last week, I hadn’t heard of this whole March Madness palava? Hence the lack of real comment on the Science Spring Showdown – I was basically having an ‘Englishman in New York’ moment until … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloggery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7562,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3082\/revisions\/7562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/all-geo.org\/highlyallochthonous\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}