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A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth

news.unsw.edu.au

11–20 of 29 posts

Re: A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth

#11
post #5
post #3

A little bit of a side here, but I'm impressed with the page's presentation. It's a university website, but the layout and overall design is really polished. Great work.

The presentation has one of the most annoying things I know, it quotes itself. And it quotes a lot. It is like watching sports game when commentator says you that there will be a home run in a while, and the final game score will be such and such. You lose all the intrigue of the game this way.

This has become a pervasive journalistic practice, and I am mildly curious as to why. Has it been found to encourage a subset of readers to keep on reading, and maybe become subscribers? Maybe some readers routinely scan these teasers to decide whether they will read the article. Is it a form of SEO? (I would guess not, but it's not my field.)

It is almost as if some junior editor (or LLM, though I think this practice predates them) has been given the job of dividing the article into sections with headers, but can't be trusted to use their own words for the headers (though they can still, of course, both divide and quote out of context.) Here, this appears to have been applied after someone else (the author, perhaps?) had already divided it into sections with traditional summaries for headers.

That said, I felt this article is much more engaging than the average university press release, and presents a genuinely significant discovery without, as far as I can tell, another now-commonplace annoyance: the excessive exaggeration or misrepresentation of that significance (though one might quibble over "...and could rewrite our timeline of complex life on Earth altogether.")

Re: A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth

#13
post #3

A little bit of a side here, but I'm impressed with the page's presentation. It's a university website, but the layout and overall design is really polished. Great work.

At the bottom of the page there is a credit for Shorthand (https://shorthand.com/). It seems to be the tool that produced such beautiful results.

Re: A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth

#15
post #3

A little bit of a side here, but I'm impressed with the page's presentation. It's a university website, but the layout and overall design is really polished. Great work.

A well-designed website can significantly enhance the user experience indeed

Re: A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth

#16
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The presentation has one of the most annoying things I know, it quotes itself. And it quotes a lot. It is like watching sports game when commentator says you that there will be a home run in a while, and the final game score will be such and such. You lose all the intrigue of the game this way.

This has become a pervasive journalistic practice, and I am mildly curious as to why. Has it been found to encourage a subset of readers to keep on reading, and maybe become subscribers? Maybe some readers routinely scan these teasers to decide whether they will read the article. Is it a form of SEO? (I would guess not, but it's not my field.) It is almost as if some junior editor (or LLM, though I think this practic…

Pull quotes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote) have been used in magazines for decades; they’re not exactly new.

Re: A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth

#17
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has become a pervasive journalistic practice, and I am mildly curious as to why. Has it been found to encourage a subset of readers to keep on reading, and maybe become subscribers? Maybe some readers routinely scan these teasers to decide whether they will read the article. Is it a form of SEO? (I would guess not, but it's not my field.) It is almost as if some junior editor (or LLM, though I think this practic…

Pull quotes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote ) have been used in magazines for decades; they’re not exactly new.

I should have known that, as I have been reading magazines for decades, so the question now (for me) is why I have only recently found them to be intrusive - is it me that's changed?

Re: A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth

#19
post #12

Does anyone know the smallest features preserved by fossils? For example, would cellular machinery like the ribosome be preserved? The shape of DNA? (Both assuming this cell had these)

I've no idea about fossils, but I suspect macromolecules like ribosomes or DNA might have too small features to fossilise?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfossil

> A microfossil is a fossil that is generally between 0.001 mm and 1 mm in size

Which is a bit vague, but 0.001mm is 1000nm while a ribosome is in the range of 20-30 nm diameter. So a whole ribosome is around a 1/50 below the lower end of the microfossil range.

Even though DNA can be a lot longer (1000 base pairs is 3.4 nm - I think? - so a hundred kilobases would be 300-400 nm) the atomic features are too small to fossilise would be my guess.

Re: A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth

#20
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pull quotes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote ) have been used in magazines for decades; they’re not exactly new.

I should have known that, as I have been reading magazines for decades, so the question now (for me) is why I have only recently found them to be intrusive - is it me that's changed?

I think it's more annoying when the quote is (more or less) directly before the actual same text (like here). As such, it has no helpful function for the normal reader - it's only annoying (but might help the skim reader or rather only the "scroller" who doesn't really read). Whereas in magazines it was that you opened the page and looked at those few quotes and decided whether you wanted to read the text, in that way the quotes are not really annoying imo.
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