I like stuff.

gerb was my high school physics teacher. (gerb is short for mr. gerber.) when we were learning about radiation and whatnot, and we touched on radiation poisoning, gerb decided to tell us a story.

when gerb was in high school, he worked in a supermarket. a cashier. there was this one little old lady, mrs. cassopolis, who was a regular. mrs. cassopolis firmly believed that the lasers used to scan her food items would give her radiation poisoning. they tried to explain that’s not a thing. but old cass wouldn’t hear a word of it.

the employees had to punch in every. last. grocery. item. MANUALLY.

and this woman would buy cartfulls of food every week, like any good grandma trying to feed her five children and eighteen grandchildren every time they come for a Sunday visit. so pretty soon, the employees figured out a strategy to get her on her way and get on with their lives.

one or more employees would distract old cass while the cashier would scan all the items he could as fast as humanly possible while she wasn’t paying attention.

now this supermarket had a rewards program for its most efficient workers. the computer would track how quickly the cashiers scanned items, and how many total they scanned in one day, that kind of thing. so one day, gerb’s boss came to him and said “uh,”

“you scanned three hundred items in six minutes last Tuesday during your shift” and gerb says “i recall” “that’s about four times faster than anything i’ve ever seen” and gerb says “yea ok” “jeremy what happened?”

and gerb says

US Elevation.

They said “before dinosaurs,” but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.

There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.

That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.

those are over a billion years old.

that’s why they’re so small. they’re the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didn’t kill any dinosaurs. or any fish. or any animals at all. because there were no animals. you know what there was?

algae.

those mountains were 5 miles tall when the most advanced life on earth was algae.