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“and the Mt. St. Helen’s sedimentary depositions that bring the whole presuppositions of history of geology, as taught, into disrepute.)”

—I’m guessing that the layers that the site is discussing are these (at least, it’s the only photos of layers that I can find):
http://www.creationism.org/articles/nelson1.htm
The problem is that any geologist undergrad should be able to quickly discern that the layers are volcanic ash that consolidated, and probably formed very quickly from a single volcanic eruption.

Here’s another well known example:
http://gregvaughn.photoshelter.com/image/I0000vX.buOgCKmQ
That’s Cathedral Rock - also from a single eruption, with subsequent erosion exposing the layers.
Other pics:
http://www.highonadventure.com/Hoa08aug/Vicki/Digging%20Ancient%20Dirt.htm

Here’s a description of how such layers are formed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuff
“During some volcanic eruptions a layer of ashes several feet in thickness is deposited over a considerable district, but such beds thin out rapidly as the distance from the crater increases, and ash deposits covering many square miles are usually very thin. The showers of ashes often follow one another after longer or shorter intervals, and hence thick masses of tuff, whether of subaerial or of marine origin, have mostly a stratified character. The coarsest materials or agglomerates show this least distinctly; in the fine beds it is often developed in great perfection.”

“Syria said it never happened, and Hezbollah won’t comment.”

That sure sounds guilty.

“My cow; you’re goodusername under a second acct. That’s frowned upon.”

—This is my only account, I’m afraid.

“If it’s the same bone [your cite says it was found in 2000; my cite talks about a bone found in 2002]”

—It’s the same bone. It was found in 2000, and was excavated over three summers (summer of 2000, 2001, and 2002). And so it wasn’t until 2002 that Schweitzer got to experiment on the bone.

Oy vey, I probably shouldn’t but perhaps another recap would help. As you point out in 119, you state:

“It took a veterinarian to recognize blood cells, because he wasn’t blinded by evolutionary assumptions.”

I responded by pointing out that Mary had trouble with the slides and so wasn’t seeing much of anything (probably due to how miniscule the remains were) - and so went to a histologist for help. Or, to directly quote:
“[Shweitzer] was having trouble preparing the slides, and went to a vet histologist who specializes in preparing slides made from bone for help, and she then showed the slides to a pathologist who believed them to be blood cells. I don’t think it would be obvious to a nonspecialist.”

To which you responded, confusingly:

“Wrong. It was a veterinarian who first identified the blood cells.”

Well, it was a veterinary conference. Gayle, the histologist and the unnamed pathologist are both veterinarians. “Wrong”? Wrong about what? I wasn’t sure what you meant, but thought maybe you were stating that it was the veterinarian Gayle who first noticed the red blood cells instead of the pathologist (although, that person, too, is a veterinarian). You then, for some reason, cite the Smithsonian article (perhaps you think the Smithsonian article contradicts the Earth Magazine article because they give some different details? They don’t contradict though.) And then you state:

“But I do appreciate how your version eliminates the veterinarian altogether.”

Again, the veterinarian was a pathologist. At this point I’m thinking that maybe you didn’t realize that the pathologist I referred to was also a veterinarian, and so you thought I had the wrong person. (I still think that that’s where you’re confused, but I’m not sure, since, as usual, you wouldn’t answer the question.) And so to try to clear things up I respond:

“Ah, by vet I thought you were specifically referring to Gayle. But yes, the pathologist is a vet as well.”

I thought that would clear everything up and we’d be able to move on. I stated that I misunderstood (due to your error, although I didn’t say that), and then tried to subtly (and nicely, without directly stating you were in error) fix where I thought the confusion was (by stating that the pathologist is a vet).

At least, I HOPED we’d move on since the question of “which vet first noticed the red blood cells” is easily the least interesting and least relevant part of the whole discussion. Yet, you decided to have a tantrum and make that the ONLY topic of discussion for all of the following rambling, incoherent, ad hominem posts.

“If you are playing dumb, that is a jerkish thing to do. If you are genuinely this clueless...that is just freakishly scary.”

—Really? Let’s see who’s being clueless... try to answer one simple question (and speaking of ‘playing dumb’ and being ‘jerkish,’ you have yet to even try answering any questions.) When you said:
“Wrong. It was a veterinarian who first identified the blood cells.”

What was it that I was wrong about?

“If you are still this clueless then it’s not communication skills you lack. It is rudimentary reading comprehension at which you fail.”

—heh I figured you would just continue with insults instead of owning up to your error. But thanks anyway for the entertaining (albeit very odd) exchange.

"So you made a faulty assumption that cost me unjustifiable time & energy to correct, & your reaction is: “I have no idea what you’re now arguing about.”?"

I thought this was cleared up all the way back in post 116.
Why you're still going on about it in post after post and wasting your own time and energy, I have no idea (well, I do have an idea, but I won't mention it out of courtesy.)
If you were still confused about it after 116, it's due to your own lack of communication skills.

"Of course if you’d been that lucid, I’d have responded, ‘What makes you assume that? Callis is not the vet referred to in the Smithsonian article’."

Gayle, the vet histologist, is referred to in the Smithsonian article - along with the unnamed vet pathologist.

And the reason why I thought you were referring to Gayle is because when I mentioned that it was a pathologist that first suggested that the remains were those of red blood cells, you replied:
"Wrong. It was a veterinarian who first identified the blood cells."

If it's not the pathologist, than what other vet could you possibly mean but Gayle? It was because of your error that I thought you were referring to Gayle.

"So you didn’t think it was ‘Gayle’ after all; you thought it was a pathologist. You can’t keep your stories straight long enough to even cover your screw ups."

Huh? When did I ever say or suggest that it was Gayle that identified the red blood cell remains?
Again, I don't think I'm the one here with the communication issues.

“Now it turns out I was right. So what are you going to do? Waste my time w more babble, misdirection & dishonesty, or admit I was right?”

—Huh? I already said I misunderstood - when you mentioned the vet I thought you were referring to Gayle. I’m not disagreeing with you, and I have no idea what you’re now arguing about.

“So you are claiming to identify the ‘one of the vets’ by name? Where do you get this info? Link, please.”

—huh? The only vet I have a name for is Gayle.

"But I do appreciate how your version eliminates the veterinarian altogether. Less embarrassing that way, isn't it? After all, no one less than a pathologist (according to you) can recognize red discs of blood sitting in a vein, right?"

Ah, by vet I thought you were specifically referring to Gayle. But yes, the pathologist is a vet as well. Actually, I would think that Gayle, as a histologist, would be somewhat more qualified to identify the remains. Although pathologists do quite a bit of that kind of work too.

I'm not sure who it is that you think should feel embarrassed, or why. Mary? Gayle? I have no idea how difficult it was to identify the remains as red blood cells under a microscope.

"Are you trying to make a joke? Or have you drunk so deeply of the evolutionist Kool Aid, you don't see how ridiculous that statement is?"

So let me see if I have it straight on what it is you think happened: Mary doesn't think it's red blood cells - Jack isn't even open to the possibility of it being red blood cells, so he instructs his employee to spend her time trying to prove that they're not red blood cells. Do you really don't see how ridiculous THAT is?

"Shweitzer's boss advised her to find evidence to show that what looked like red blood cells was NOT red blood cells--& you claim this means he thought they WERE red blood cells?"

YES. Unless he thought they WERE red blood cells - or at least quite open to the possibility - why would they BOTHER trying to prove that they're not?

As I asked before: Isn't that the advice you would expect him to give if he thought they might be remains of blood cells? What, pray tell, do you think he would say?

Let's say you were a scientist with lab technicians, and you think that perhaps your group has made an amazing find - let's call it 'X' - what would you instruct your lab technicians to do? I would instruct the technicians to do their very best to prove it's NOT X!

And news flash: THAT'S HOW SCIENCE IS SUPPOSED TO WORK. If you have a theory, you do your darndest to disprove it first before publishing it for the world.

"Wrong. It was a veterinarian who first identified the blood cells."

"We first came upon the possibility that proteins might exist in the the T. rex quite by accident. In the fall of 1991, I was trying to find a way to prevent the T. rex bone sections from slipping off glass slides. Looking for some help, I took the samples to the university's vet histologist, Gayle Callis, who specializes in examinations of modern bone. Then I promptly forgot about them. Three months later she called. Apparently she had taken the samples to a conference, and someone asked her about the oldest bone she had ever worked with. She said, "I just happen to have this dinosaur sample...." and put it under a microscope. A pathologist took a look at it and said, "Do you know you have blood cells in this bone?" Gayle brought the slides back and showed me. And that's when all the excitement in the lab began." Earth Magazine June 1997

"Oh yes indeed, he was open to the possibility. So open, he gave Shweitzer this advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”"

Exactly. Isn't that the advice you would expect him to give if he thought they might be remains of blood cells?

"No, she didn’t. She didn’t recognize red blood cells at all because she wasn’t expecting to see any. It took a veterinarian to recognize blood cells, because he wasn’t blinded by evolutionary assumptions. The vet, according to Shweitzer, turned out to be right. Now how about you explain why she missed something this obvious."

Actually, at that point Mary wasn't seeing much at all. She was having trouble preparing the slides, and went to a vet histologist who specializes in preparing slides made from bone for help, and she then showed the slides to a pathologist who believed them to be blood cells.
I don't think it would be obvious to a nonspecialist.

"& while you’re at it, explain her boss’s reaction. Why did he immediately dismiss the possibility that she had discovered blood cells?"

Are you referring to Jack Horner? He never dismissed the possibility, and in fact was immediately open to the possibility.

“Amazing what a well kept secret this T-Rex red-blood cell/soft-tissue discovery is, isn’t it? I wonder how many people in the whole world know about it.”

—I can’t tell if that comment was meant to be sarcastic or not.
It’s easily one of the most publicized and talked about science stories of the past 20 years.

“As one poster originally said, if such a find were genuine, it wd make for a Nobel Prize.”

—A Nobel prize in what?

“I had not read about the Mt. St. Helens dating fiasco, but I read about a similar one. They took a sample from one of those ancient pines, I think located in CA. By tree-ring data they knew its exact age, but then they had it carbon dated. The 5,000 yo tree was dated as being between 100,000 & a million years old. Don’t hear much about that little experiment either, do you?”

It’s not possible to get a radiocarbon date of over 100k years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating
Radiocarbon dating (or simply carbon dating) is a technique that uses the decay of carbon-14 (14C) to estimate the age of organic materials, such as wood and leather, up to about 58,000 to 62,000 years

Fantasywriter:

"Did you look at the slides? There were actual blood vessels w blood inside. Here’s a quote:"

Yes, I read the site you gave, and the original articles describing the finds.

The remains found are proteins. The proteins can still hold the shape of the structure they came from helping to indicate where they came from.
Shweitzer, for instance, believed that some of the remains were those of red bloods because of the shape of the remains.

Here's a quote from the site you linked:

"Several analytical techniques were used to characterize the material to include nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Raman resonance and Raman spectroscopy (RR) and electron spin resonance (ESR). These techniques did identify the presence of heme group molecules ranging in size from between 5,000 and 30,000 daltons (between 35 to over 200 amino acids in size), but the detection limits of these methods were not able to rule-out or rule-in the presence of hemoglobin or myoglobin proteins due to the small amount of specimen available."

What they are looking at are proteins. And note that the amount found was so small that it was difficult to analyze, even with the latest technology.

They then had the clever idea of testing for an immune response in rats.

This worked because, as Shweitzer explained on the site: "Immunogenicity is not dependent on fully intact protein, and even very small peptides are immunogenic when complexed with larger organic molecules . . . even after extensive degradation has occurred."

We're not even talking about whole proteins here, just bits of protein.

"Does that really sound like a 65 million yo specimen to you?"

It depends what you're comparing it to. If mammoth CARCASSES are found with which one could hold a mammoth BBQ, that are tens of thousands of years old - then how old do these massive fossilized bones with microscopic protein bits protected deep inside them appear to be?

Fantasywriter,

Sakic, it’s not improbable. It’s impossible. Protein, blood, soft-tissue—they cannot & do not remain intact for even one million yrs. This is a fact.

What do you base that on? Actually, it wasn't that long ago that a number of scientists were speculating that we may be able to sequence dino dna using new technology (like PCR) by finding pieces of DNA that might survive in certain environments (such as in amber).

This is what inspired Crichton to write Jurassic Park. A couple of decades later, we're still waiting for a single dino nucleotide.

And bear in mind that the "soft tissue" we're finding is bits of protein that decay vastly slower than dna.

In any case, it doesn't seem "impossible," IMO, to find microscopic bits of protein buried deep inside fossilized bones tens of millions of years old, when you consider that we find complete mammoths that are tens of thousands of years old that look like they died a few days ago.

“I read this quote at least a half dozen times, convinced that I had somehow missed its consoling message. But, alas, there was no consoling message.”

—Ingersoll was referring to Hell. Many Christians believe that most people end up there. So Ingersoll is saying that if there is no afterlife, you don’t have to worry about your loved ones being in a place of eternal torment for all of eternity.

“When have you ever seen any “atheist” attack any religion except Christianity (or Judaism)?”

—How about in the many books, speeches, debates, interviews of atheists? Try Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Sam Harris, Bill Maher, etc etc. If you’ve ever read or watched anything by them, I’m not sure how you could have missed it? I would think it was a rhetorical question except you seem to make such statements quite often.

Maybe you stick to Christian websites and books which aren’t likely to quote atheists criticizing Islam?

Here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhYus6TiGEE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an7TaDQ5Yo0&feature=related

Oops, typoed the link (should test before hitting “Post”):
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/07/ronald-reagan-day-in-california.html