Palmierite (and atacamite?)

[Jorge_Stolfi]

If another materials scientist were to challenge the results, then I would listen. In the present scenario - not.

Rene, what can I say? Obviously your a priori confidence in experts is much higher than mine.  Perhaps because, in your profession, experts must be really experts?  In mine, unfortunately, and in many others, I have seen many "experts" who get by only because the people who use their opinions cannot tell when they are just guessing, or flat out wrong.  

Or even intentionally lying in order to protect their own interests, like J. Eric Thompson about Maya writing 

And then there is the academic "omertà" -- "I will not speak out about your incompetence if you do not speak out about mine."

And then there is the problem that an expert's opinion about X is not very significant, if his expertise was acquired on zillions of cases which are all different from X.   Like the VMS is different from all the zillion manuscripts that experts are familiar with.

When I was a teenager, at some point I had a dozen fish tanks and bred many kinds of fish, from plain guppies to bettas and such. I read aquarium manuals and knew by heart the binomial names of all the fishes, plants, snails, worms etc in my tanks.  Since then I watched hundreds of documentaries of fish, including many of Jacques Cousteau's and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and learned all about fishes that fly and fishes that walk, sea horses and sea basses, coelacanths and molas; and I bought and cooked lots of fish, and ate lots of sushi and sashimi.   

If that does not make me an expert on fishes, I don't know what would.  And one thing that I learned from all that experience is that all fish have gills.   Therefore, when I tell you that whales have gills, you'd better believe it.



All the best, sincerely, --stolfi