Monday, July 18, 2011

How to Not Explain the Deborah Number

While I normally find XKCD to be entertaining, I thought today's cartoon was a horrible way to explain the Deborah Number:

The explanation is not wrong per se, but it's just too long winded in getting to the point, and misses the perspective that rheologist, geologists,evolutionary biologists, cosmologists and other have: that the time scale of a human being is too short of a time interval to be an appropriate unit for observing the natural world.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

And the mountains flowed before the
time vulture....

John said...

LOL!