"This has been addressed elsewhere in this/. story and/. already has sufficient dupes, so I won't address it again."
It's been a little while since I've looked at this thread since I've been gone for about three days now, and I don't feel like picking through it again so I'm not sure where the "dupes" as you put them are. However, you can't deny the fact that the presence of reduced iron deposits suggests the atmosphere at the time was *not* oxidizing. It's basic chemistry, and in case the laws of physics have changed since then, chemical reactions worked the same then as they do now.
Now, I don't know where you get your info from on the rates of orogeny and such, but let me cite an example. Currently, the Himalayas are being uplifted at a rate of 1cm per year. This is measurable, so it's cold, hard, can't-get-around-it data. As the page says, in 1 million years, that is 10 *kilometers* worth of uplift. To explain the inevitable question of "why aren't they higher then?", when you account for the weight of such a body of rock depressing the crust and for erosion, that's why they aren't higher.
You speak of the Washington badlands and the Grand Canyon as points of very rapid erosion. You are only right about Washington. The explanation is very straightforward: there was a large glacial lake (Lake Bonneville) much like the current great lakes (but it was much bigger) that basically "broke through the dam" so to speak, releasing it's contents into the Snake and subsequently Columbia rivers. In the case of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River existed beforehand, and during uplift of the Colorado plateau, the erosion of the river kept pace, eating down through the rocks. Now obviously, you don't believe that this could happen, as I think I argued with out about this before. However, let's think about this logically. *If* all the strata in the Grand Canyon were laid down by a catastrophic flood (throwing out the fact that in such a flood you would have turbulent flow and you couldn't get the vast number of differing rock types in sequence as they are), then why is there an angular unconformity? Did the flood waters decide to stop, wait for a those rocks to be lithified and tilted, then continue on and lay down the rest of the rock layers? If the flood waters were depositing a certain rock type at any one point in time, whey is it not possible to correlate all those formations all across the USA, or even the world? When did the basin and range extension that created the great basin that Lake Bonneville eventually filled cut through these rocks forming the fault blocks that make up the basin? The ancient wave-cut, shore terraces can still be seen in many places in Utah and Nevada...I know because I've seen them. Let me summarize the screwed up order of events you are proposing. 1) Great flood occurs. 1a) Sediments are deposited as a result, Grand Canyon is cut, etc. 2) Faulting cuts these rocks afterwards. In fact a branch of the Hurricane fault intersects the canyon at Lava Falls (basaltic volcanism has been closely associated with these faults). However, the reason there was a basin for a lake to fill up in the first place was the faulting, seeing as there are wave cut terraces within the basins formed by the faulting. There doesn't even have to be an age argument here...we're just talking order of events, right?
Now, I know you posted lots of stuff about different religions, but that's not really my point (not directly anyway). My point is that there is good scientific evidence to support the age of the Earth at 4.6 billion years old. I know you also don't believe in radiometric dating, so it's hard to argue that point. It's like last weekend my fiancee and I had a meeting with her pastor (Missouri Synod Lutheran...yuck) whom is going to marry us in just over a month. I actually got into an argument with him about the age of the Earth, because I felt like he insulte
From previous arguments I've had with you here on slashdot, I have surmised that you believe in creation, not evolution, and thus a young earth, etc. What I would like to know is what hardcore rock solid evidence do YOU have that YOUR ideas are not just like every other fairy tale? Seriously, I'd like to know. All I ever see you do is harp on any possible slight imperfection in science and use that as your evidence, which is completely circumstantial. In other words, where is the data that shows that life couldn't have begun from such amino acids in a natural primordial environment like the experiment suggests, and that evolution didn't occur. And if it exists, has it been published in a peer-reviewed, respectable scientific journal? Sorry to sound bitchy, but that's just how I feel about such thinking.
Also, you are wrong about no evidence for a reducing atmosphere. The existance of iron deposits known as banded iron formations is the evidence you need. These deposits are sedimentary in nature, meaning that the iron was accumulating underwater near the surface. Had the atmosphere at the time been oxidizing (basically oxygen rich), these deposits could not have formed since iron would have combined with the oxygen in the atmosphere to form rust basically (hematite, Fe2O3). Instead, these formations are magnetite (Fe3O4), which contains the reduced form of iron, Fe(III). This is why the occurence of banded iron formations decreases and eventually dissapears sometime during the proterozoic (1.8 to 2 billion years ago seems to stick in my head) once the atmosphere became oxidizing. A nice short, but good explanation can be found here.
I've posted this link before but...
on
Digital Darwin
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· Score: 1
I've posted this link before on/., but I figure a story like this is going to stir up a great number of people that would both strongly agree and disagree. So, here it is.
Actually, I wasn't referring to the actual preservation of the original organic material, but to the preservation of the appearance of the material (in other words, is it a fossilized red blood cell?)
Re:All of geology does not hinge on one assumption
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Ancient DNA
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"Surprisingly little geology is entirely reliant on a precise (or even vague) age for the Earth. All that matters for a great many things is the order in which things happened, not the time they took to get that way."
Oh how wrong you are. The basic concepts of geology (rock types, relationships, etc) do not necessarily depend on the age of the earth. However, in most research done on real world applications, the exact date of an event is very important. As they say, timing is everything. This is why most people doing research in igneous rocks always obtain radiometric and/or paleomagnetic age dates. People doing research on sedimentary rocks always have very good biostratigraphic control. The reason this is important is so that correlation to events of a known age is possible. For example, say I have a lead-zinc mineralization event that I'm trying to find a cause for. Well ok...one of the most important things to do is get an estimate on the date of mineralization, and then see if there are any local or regional tectonic and/or magmatic events of known ages that may have had an effect.
"For the remaining few, circumstances there are some substantial hints in the field (e.g. paraconformities, massive undisturbed polystratic fossils, rapid paleomagnetic reversals, awesome flood erosion) and in the lab (e.g. conflicting interpretations for dates, rates, ratios and embedment scenarios) that there are great and appropriately cavernous gaps in our understanding of geology."
"Hint" 1: Paraconformities are just an unconformity of parallel strata...I don't see what the "problem" is with these.
"Hint" 2: What polystratic fossils are you talking about? Just because the style of deposition changes doesn't mean all new critters have to start living there.
"Hint" 3: The earth's magnetic field does reverse from time to time. It is recorded in parallel bands to the mid oceanic ridges of known ages...oh wait, can't argue that since you don't think the earth is that old anyway.
"Hint" 4: What flood erosion do you speak of? The best example I can think of is ancient Lake Bonneville, of which the Great Salt Lake is the last remaining bit. You can still see the wave cut terraces out in Utah and Nevada. Again, the age of this has been well documented.
As for your "problems" with lab geology, 99% of the time when age dates do not match up so well, there is a very good reason why. For example, a fluid flow or low grade metamorphic event may reset one isotopic system, but not another. Also, weathered rocks will have their isotopic systems screwed up compared to unaltered rocks (this violates the most important assumption of maintaining a closed system anyway). If *careful* sampling is done, the dates almost *always* agree. When I say careful, I mean things like selecting completely unaltered samples, or abrading zircon grains to remove the possibly altered outer layers to get at the surely unaltered core.
Anyway...in conclusion, I really don't think there are really too many "great and appropriately cavernous gaps in our understanding of geology" at all that can't be explained by good fundamental science.
Re:Try 65,000,000 years - in real life!
on
Ancient DNA
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"Says the majority of the scientific community. There is a huge difference between fossil preservation of basic structures and preservation of actual organic matter. Laboratory observation of DNA break down suggests 10k years as the upper limit beyond which it will have completely broken down. Even under extra-ordinary preservation circumstances the longest survivability I've seen suggested is 100k years. Preservation over a million years is simply not expected."
I completely agree actually. All I was trying to say was that I don't see why some traces of the blood cells themselves may have been preserved. I didn't say that actual DNA could be preserved for so long, although perhaps I should have made that more clear.
Re:Try 65,000,000 years - in real life!
on
Ancient DNA
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· Score: 1
"Preserving something as frail as an organic macrostructure over as much as 1% of that timespan is of course well beyond impossible..."
Says who? Remarkable preservation of fossils...even soft bodied organisms (Burgess Shale for one...and that is in *much* older rocks), does occur. I don't find it so hard of a stretch that the conditions for burial and preservation were such that the entire bone did not become mineralized and left some traces of blood cells.
"...so the fact that it appears to have happened should be telling us something important about our leading assumptions."
You mean that the entirety of geology is completely wrong because we "assume" the Earth has been around for 4.6GA? Does it not matter that multiple age dating techniques have produced, within error, the same dates when the proper assumptions are not violated? Does it not matter that all of this has been peer reviewed and accepted as good and proper science?
Actually, I just tried it...and it gave me an error that flashed up on mozilla for a second or two. Then, however, it bumped me straight to the front page and I could click on any link I wanted with no registration. Interesting.
It's pretty cool that they found these hydrothermal vents, but the concept of fluids circulating deep down into the basement rock...even to the mantle...and then being re-circulated back up when heated is not new. This is the basic principle behind the formation of certain types of ore deposits.
I suppose the big thing with this discovery is the occurrence of life down there in the absence of extreme volcanic heat and not the presence of the vents themselves.
Re:How is it a Linux Review without the Distro?
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Linux SMP Round-Up
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Whoops, screwed up the html tags on that link. Ah well.
Re:How is it a Linux Review without the Distro?
on
Linux SMP Round-Up
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Re:How is it a Linux Review without the Distro?
on
Linux SMP Round-Up
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I'm also pretty sure there is a linux smp binary for Quake3 (or was). I think id may have stopped supporting it since on newer SMP systems, there is no benefit. Also, maybe I'm confused, but the parent poster seems to think that an Nvidia card is needed to run a server. This is also not true, seeing as a dedicated server runs in a dos window in Win32, and in a terminal window in Linux.
I am a geologist (although I am not an earthquake seismologist, I do dabble in structural geology), and I can't say I've heard anything about determining the possible magnitude of a quake through total surface area of the fault (at least it was never talked about in any class I've ever had...if you can cite a reference to back that up, I'd like to read it). Typically, such large fault systems are not a single plane of movement, but many many en echelon or conjugate fractures that can jump from one location to another with depth and lateral distance. As such, I would think it is damn near impossible to figure out the total surface area. What can be done is to observe the intensity of deformation of rocks near and on the fault plane of interest. It is possible to estimate how big of an earthquake is needed to produce the deformation observed.
Another thing to note about the Seattle seismic zone is that the "fault" is actually a subducting slab of oceanic crust, and earthquake epicenters tend to be *very* deep compared to most in California. A 7.0 quake 40 miles down or so is going to do far less damage at the surface than a 7.0 quake much closer to the surface.
Umm, no. In the article it is stated that the virus has an approximate size of 400 nanometers, and 1 nanomater is 1x10^-9 meters. Definitely microscopic.
Exactly!! And in fact, most radiometric dating techniques become far more robust as the age of the rock increases. Also, I don't think that people realize that +- a few million years isn't that much compared next to 4.6 billion years of Earth's history. We're also always coming up with ways to decrease the error. One example is separating out the mineral of interest, and then abrading the edges of that mineral away to get to the core of the mineral. If that mineral ever had undergone weathering or alteration by a fluid, the core of the mineral should be the last thing to alter if at all, right? By dating the cores of minerals, it is possible to get rid of a lot of error.
The funny thing (with respect to creationists) is for rock samples that pass the assumptions for radiometric dating, the most important being maintaining a closed system (ie, no fluid passing through or metamorphism/deformation occurring, all of which would reset the age to be the age of the altering event), multiple dating methods come within remarkable agreement of each other. You always see creationists citing all the examples where it doesn't work (usually explainable by other means), yet never citing examples where it does work. True scientists report all data, and then come up with theories to explain anamolous results.
Hell, for using Uranium in dating there are *three* different Lead daughter isotopes (originating from Uranium 235, 238, and Thorium 234). Typically in carefully selected samples, the dates from the different decay paths in this system come out very close to each other. I would cite a specific example right here, however I can't find my isotope geochemistry book at the moment.
Then, I've had people try to tell me that you can't assume a closed system on Earth due to all the weathering that occurs. I think most people would agree that the moon has to have been in Earth's orbit from since very close to the formation of the Earth. Ok then, let's go to the moon...oh wait, we have already! Moon rocks (never having been exposed to weathering processes as on Earth) very nicely yield dates in the 4.5 to 4.6 billion year range using multiple dating methods. This stuff *does* really work.
"The key point, which seems to have been missed..."
I think *YOU* have missed the key point in this case, and that is that radiometric dating does not work for very young rocks. I believe the parent post's point 3 accounts for the problem that you seem to have. I'll even cut and paste it so you can read it again:
"3) THE SAMPLES ARE ONLY 10 YEARS OLD!!!! that is (by a long shot) not enough time to accumulate radiogenic 40Ar in the sample. the half-life of 40K is just too damn long and given the state of the art in mass spectrometry, there is no way to get a high enough signal to noise (e.g. count enough 40Ar atoms) to calcualate an age (let alone a reliable one). even if you analyze tens of kilograms of sample (which is not practical)."
Another point to mention is the mixing of magmas with differing initial isotopic ratios can give you a bogus age as well. This is especially true in the strontium isotopic system. I happen to know very young basalts in the East African Rift yield very old dates due to this.
My point is that these bogus ages that you claim shows radiometric dating doesn't work can and are explained by other factors that people like you don't take into account.
I think his whole list can be summed up by this question: has it been reviewed by a panel of the "scientists" peers and subsequently published in a respected journal? If the science is too bogus to pass this, then likely most or all of his points apply.
"Does that mean that the local rock & mineral club, of which I'm a member, could be violating laws when we go out and study the local terrain, searching for specimens?"
Absolutely not. However, if you were running a *commercial* mining operation and hired geologist who were either not licensed, or were not in the process of taking the appropriate tests to become licensed, you would be in trouble.
"I'm glad I don't live in California."
As far as I know, damn near all states require professional geologist to be licensed. The shitty thing is that there is no standardized exam yet, so being licensed in one state may not be good enough if you get a job in another state. I considered taking the Missouri test, because it is compatible with a few other states, but it costs a lot of money and was going to be more trouble than it's worth for me right now.
Actually, they don't have better things to do. A bunch of snake-oil salesmen claiming to be able to predict earthquakes is far more important than a silly thing like PayPal. Think of it what would happen if these "geoForecaster" folks falsely predicted a major earthquake would happen, causing all sorts of problems by people freaking out.
I'm old enough to remember extremely well the time that crackpot (Iben Browning I think his name was?) predicted a major earthquake in the New Madrid seismic zone here in southeast Missouri. The amount of absolute ignorance that caused was astounding. I remember my school going to the great trouble to get *everything* bolted to the walls, and we started having earthquake drills too.
The bottom line is nobody can predict earthquakes yet, and someone claiming to be able to without publishing their findings in a peer-reviewed journal is just blowing smoke.
Re:Finally, a use for all these things...
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NES PC
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Or, you could call Nintendo up and ask for one. A friend of mine got a hold of an old nintendo with the worn out pin connectors, and he really wanted to play it. So, he actually called up Nintendo, told them he was an electrical engineering student (total B.S., he was really a geology major) interested in playing around with a Nintendo to see how it worked and to hack around with it and such. The guy he was talking to bought the story completely and agreed to ship a replacement pin connector to him free of charge. No Joke.
I happen to live in Missouri, so I am hoping this goes through. I have heard rumors in the past about such legislation being proposed. One thing I want to know is what are the exceptions. Missouri currently has a no-call list, but there are certain exceptions to this (like alma maters calling you and hitting you up for money). However, I really can't see the majority of people actually taking up violations in court. Hell, a lot of times the spam just gets bounced through some unsuspecting person's insecure mail server. What happens in this case?
Slashdot Mirror
It's been a little while since I've looked at this thread since I've been gone for about three days now, and I don't feel like picking through it again so I'm not sure where the "dupes" as you put them are. However, you can't deny the fact that the presence of reduced iron deposits suggests the atmosphere at the time was *not* oxidizing. It's basic chemistry, and in case the laws of physics have changed since then, chemical reactions worked the same then as they do now.
Now, I don't know where you get your info from on the rates of orogeny and such, but let me cite an example. Currently, the Himalayas are being uplifted at a rate of 1cm per year. This is measurable, so it's cold, hard, can't-get-around-it data. As the page says, in 1 million years, that is 10 *kilometers* worth of uplift. To explain the inevitable question of "why aren't they higher then?", when you account for the weight of such a body of rock depressing the crust and for erosion, that's why they aren't higher.
You speak of the Washington badlands and the Grand Canyon as points of very rapid erosion. You are only right about Washington. The explanation is very straightforward: there was a large glacial lake (Lake Bonneville) much like the current great lakes (but it was much bigger) that basically "broke through the dam" so to speak, releasing it's contents into the Snake and subsequently Columbia rivers. In the case of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River existed beforehand, and during uplift of the Colorado plateau, the erosion of the river kept pace, eating down through the rocks. Now obviously, you don't believe that this could happen, as I think I argued with out about this before. However, let's think about this logically. *If* all the strata in the Grand Canyon were laid down by a catastrophic flood (throwing out the fact that in such a flood you would have turbulent flow and you couldn't get the vast number of differing rock types in sequence as they are), then why is there an angular unconformity? Did the flood waters decide to stop, wait for a those rocks to be lithified and tilted, then continue on and lay down the rest of the rock layers? If the flood waters were depositing a certain rock type at any one point in time, whey is it not possible to correlate all those formations all across the USA, or even the world? When did the basin and range extension that created the great basin that Lake Bonneville eventually filled cut through these rocks forming the fault blocks that make up the basin? The ancient wave-cut, shore terraces can still be seen in many places in Utah and Nevada...I know because I've seen them. Let me summarize the screwed up order of events you are proposing. 1) Great flood occurs. 1a) Sediments are deposited as a result, Grand Canyon is cut, etc. 2) Faulting cuts these rocks afterwards. In fact a branch of the Hurricane fault intersects the canyon at Lava Falls (basaltic volcanism has been closely associated with these faults). However, the reason there was a basin for a lake to fill up in the first place was the faulting, seeing as there are wave cut terraces within the basins formed by the faulting. There doesn't even have to be an age argument here...we're just talking order of events, right?
Now, I know you posted lots of stuff about different religions, but that's not really my point (not directly anyway). My point is that there is good scientific evidence to support the age of the Earth at 4.6 billion years old. I know you also don't believe in radiometric dating, so it's hard to argue that point. It's like last weekend my fiancee and I had a meeting with her pastor (Missouri Synod Lutheran...yuck) whom is going to marry us in just over a month. I actually got into an argument with him about the age of the Earth, because I felt like he insulte
From previous arguments I've had with you here on slashdot, I have surmised that you believe in creation, not evolution, and thus a young earth, etc. What I would like to know is what hardcore rock solid evidence do YOU have that YOUR ideas are not just like every other fairy tale? Seriously, I'd like to know. All I ever see you do is harp on any possible slight imperfection in science and use that as your evidence, which is completely circumstantial. In other words, where is the data that shows that life couldn't have begun from such amino acids in a natural primordial environment like the experiment suggests, and that evolution didn't occur. And if it exists, has it been published in a peer-reviewed, respectable scientific journal? Sorry to sound bitchy, but that's just how I feel about such thinking.
Also, you are wrong about no evidence for a reducing atmosphere. The existance of iron deposits known as banded iron formations is the evidence you need. These deposits are sedimentary in nature, meaning that the iron was accumulating underwater near the surface. Had the atmosphere at the time been oxidizing (basically oxygen rich), these deposits could not have formed since iron would have combined with the oxygen in the atmosphere to form rust basically (hematite, Fe2O3). Instead, these formations are magnetite (Fe3O4), which contains the reduced form of iron, Fe(III). This is why the occurence of banded iron formations decreases and eventually dissapears sometime during the proterozoic (1.8 to 2 billion years ago seems to stick in my head) once the atmosphere became oxidizing. A nice short, but good explanation can be found here.
I've posted this link before on /., but I figure a story like this is going to stir up a great number of people that would both strongly agree and disagree. So, here it is.
Actually, I wasn't referring to the actual preservation of the original organic material, but to the preservation of the appearance of the material (in other words, is it a fossilized red blood cell?)
"Surprisingly little geology is entirely reliant on a precise (or even vague) age for the Earth. All that matters for a great many things is the order in which things happened, not the time they took to get that way."
Oh how wrong you are. The basic concepts of geology (rock types, relationships, etc) do not necessarily depend on the age of the earth. However, in most research done on real world applications, the exact date of an event is very important. As they say, timing is everything. This is why most people doing research in igneous rocks always obtain radiometric and/or paleomagnetic age dates. People doing research on sedimentary rocks always have very good biostratigraphic control. The reason this is important is so that correlation to events of a known age is possible. For example, say I have a lead-zinc mineralization event that I'm trying to find a cause for. Well ok...one of the most important things to do is get an estimate on the date of mineralization, and then see if there are any local or regional tectonic and/or magmatic events of known ages that may have had an effect.
"For the remaining few, circumstances there are some substantial hints in the field (e.g. paraconformities, massive undisturbed polystratic fossils, rapid paleomagnetic reversals, awesome flood erosion) and in the lab (e.g. conflicting interpretations for dates, rates, ratios and embedment scenarios) that there are great and appropriately cavernous gaps in our understanding of geology."
"Hint" 1: Paraconformities are just an unconformity of parallel strata...I don't see what the "problem" is with these.
"Hint" 2: What polystratic fossils are you talking about? Just because the style of deposition changes doesn't mean all new critters have to start living there.
"Hint" 3: The earth's magnetic field does reverse from time to time. It is recorded in parallel bands to the mid oceanic ridges of known ages...oh wait, can't argue that since you don't think the earth is that old anyway.
"Hint" 4: What flood erosion do you speak of? The best example I can think of is ancient Lake Bonneville, of which the Great Salt Lake is the last remaining bit. You can still see the wave cut terraces out in Utah and Nevada. Again, the age of this has been well documented.
As for your "problems" with lab geology, 99% of the time when age dates do not match up so well, there is a very good reason why. For example, a fluid flow or low grade metamorphic event may reset one isotopic system, but not another. Also, weathered rocks will have their isotopic systems screwed up compared to unaltered rocks (this violates the most important assumption of maintaining a closed system anyway). If *careful* sampling is done, the dates almost *always* agree. When I say careful, I mean things like selecting completely unaltered samples, or abrading zircon grains to remove the possibly altered outer layers to get at the surely unaltered core.
Anyway...in conclusion, I really don't think there are really too many "great and appropriately cavernous gaps in our understanding of geology" at all that can't be explained by good fundamental science.
"Says the majority of the scientific community. There is a huge difference between fossil preservation of basic structures and preservation of actual organic matter. Laboratory observation of DNA break down suggests 10k years as the upper limit beyond which it will have completely broken down. Even under extra-ordinary preservation circumstances the longest survivability I've seen suggested is 100k years. Preservation over a million years is simply not expected."
I completely agree actually. All I was trying to say was that I don't see why some traces of the blood cells themselves may have been preserved. I didn't say that actual DNA could be preserved for so long, although perhaps I should have made that more clear.
"Preserving something as frail as an organic macrostructure over as much as 1% of that timespan is of course well beyond impossible..."
Says who? Remarkable preservation of fossils...even soft bodied organisms (Burgess Shale for one...and that is in *much* older rocks), does occur. I don't find it so hard of a stretch that the conditions for burial and preservation were such that the entire bone did not become mineralized and left some traces of blood cells.
"...so the fact that it appears to have happened should be telling us something important about our leading assumptions."
You mean that the entirety of geology is completely wrong because we "assume" the Earth has been around for 4.6GA? Does it not matter that multiple age dating techniques have produced, within error, the same dates when the proper assumptions are not violated? Does it not matter that all of this has been peer reviewed and accepted as good and proper science?
Actually, I just tried it...and it gave me an error that flashed up on mozilla for a second or two. Then, however, it bumped me straight to the front page and I could click on any link I wanted with no registration. Interesting.
It's pretty cool that they found these hydrothermal vents, but the concept of fluids circulating deep down into the basement rock...even to the mantle...and then being re-circulated back up when heated is not new. This is the basic principle behind the formation of certain types of ore deposits.
I suppose the big thing with this discovery is the occurrence of life down there in the absence of extreme volcanic heat and not the presence of the vents themselves.
Whoops, screwed up the html tags on that link. Ah well.
That may be true and all, but you still don't need any 3d card, let alone an Nvidia card, to run the dedicated server. Also, check out this google cache I found: Info on the the quake3 1.32b release.> It talks about quake3 smp binaries for linux, so there is definitely smp for linux quake3. Quote from the article: "Default quake3 shortcut will spawn a non-SMP build. Use quake3-smp for an SMP-enabled run. From the feedback we got after the 1.32 release,
the SMP support as designed in the Quake III Arena technology isn't so much relevant anymore. It was designed for much lower CPU frequencies and lower AGP throughputs. Modern systems won't benefit from SMP. Since it didn't make much sense to remove the SMP binary, we have both now."
I'm also pretty sure there is a linux smp binary for Quake3 (or was). I think id may have stopped supporting it since on newer SMP systems, there is no benefit. Also, maybe I'm confused, but the parent poster seems to think that an Nvidia card is needed to run a server. This is also not true, seeing as a dedicated server runs in a dos window in Win32, and in a terminal window in Linux.
I am a geologist (although I am not an earthquake seismologist, I do dabble in structural geology), and I can't say I've heard anything about determining the possible magnitude of a quake through total surface area of the fault (at least it was never talked about in any class I've ever had...if you can cite a reference to back that up, I'd like to read it). Typically, such large fault systems are not a single plane of movement, but many many en echelon or conjugate fractures that can jump from one location to another with depth and lateral distance. As such, I would think it is damn near impossible to figure out the total surface area. What can be done is to observe the intensity of deformation of rocks near and on the fault plane of interest. It is possible to estimate how big of an earthquake is needed to produce the deformation observed.
Another thing to note about the Seattle seismic zone is that the "fault" is actually a subducting slab of oceanic crust, and earthquake epicenters tend to be *very* deep compared to most in California. A 7.0 quake 40 miles down or so is going to do far less damage at the surface than a 7.0 quake much closer to the surface.
Umm, no. In the article it is stated that the virus has an approximate size of 400 nanometers, and 1 nanomater is 1x10^-9 meters. Definitely microscopic.
Exactly!! And in fact, most radiometric dating techniques become far more robust as the age of the rock increases. Also, I don't think that people realize that +- a few million years isn't that much compared next to 4.6 billion years of Earth's history. We're also always coming up with ways to decrease the error. One example is separating out the mineral of interest, and then abrading the edges of that mineral away to get to the core of the mineral. If that mineral ever had undergone weathering or alteration by a fluid, the core of the mineral should be the last thing to alter if at all, right? By dating the cores of minerals, it is possible to get rid of a lot of error.
The funny thing (with respect to creationists) is for rock samples that pass the assumptions for radiometric dating, the most important being maintaining a closed system (ie, no fluid passing through or metamorphism/deformation occurring, all of which would reset the age to be the age of the altering event), multiple dating methods come within remarkable agreement of each other. You always see creationists citing all the examples where it doesn't work (usually explainable by other means), yet never citing examples where it does work. True scientists report all data, and then come up with theories to explain anamolous results.
Hell, for using Uranium in dating there are *three* different Lead daughter isotopes (originating from Uranium 235, 238, and Thorium 234). Typically in carefully selected samples, the dates from the different decay paths in this system come out very close to each other. I would cite a specific example right here, however I can't find my isotope geochemistry book at the moment.
Then, I've had people try to tell me that you can't assume a closed system on Earth due to all the weathering that occurs. I think most people would agree that the moon has to have been in Earth's orbit from since very close to the formation of the Earth. Ok then, let's go to the moon...oh wait, we have already! Moon rocks (never having been exposed to weathering processes as on Earth) very nicely yield dates in the 4.5 to 4.6 billion year range using multiple dating methods. This stuff *does* really work.
However, none of those sources agree that you could date a rock 10 years old.
"The key point, which seems to have been missed..."
I think *YOU* have missed the key point in this case, and that is that radiometric dating does not work for very young rocks. I believe the parent post's point 3 accounts for the problem that you seem to have. I'll even cut and paste it so you can read it again:
"3) THE SAMPLES ARE ONLY 10 YEARS OLD!!!! that is (by a long shot) not enough time to accumulate radiogenic 40Ar in the sample. the half-life of 40K is just too damn long and given the state of the art in mass spectrometry, there is no way to get a high enough signal to noise (e.g. count enough 40Ar atoms) to calcualate an age (let alone a reliable one). even if you analyze tens of kilograms of sample (which is not practical)."
Another point to mention is the mixing of magmas with differing initial isotopic ratios can give you a bogus age as well. This is especially true in the strontium isotopic system. I happen to know very young basalts in the East African Rift yield very old dates due to this.
My point is that these bogus ages that you claim shows radiometric dating doesn't work can and are explained by other factors that people like you don't take into account.
I think his whole list can be summed up by this question: has it been reviewed by a panel of the "scientists" peers and subsequently published in a respected journal? If the science is too bogus to pass this, then likely most or all of his points apply.
it has to be mined. 'Nuff said.
"Does that mean that the local rock & mineral club, of which I'm a member, could be violating laws when we go out and study the local terrain, searching for specimens?"
Absolutely not. However, if you were running a *commercial* mining operation and hired geologist who were either not licensed, or were not in the process of taking the appropriate tests to become licensed, you would be in trouble.
"I'm glad I don't live in California."
As far as I know, damn near all states require professional geologist to be licensed. The shitty thing is that there is no standardized exam yet, so being licensed in one state may not be good enough if you get a job in another state. I considered taking the Missouri test, because it is compatible with a few other states, but it costs a lot of money and was going to be more trouble than it's worth for me right now.
Actually, they don't have better things to do. A bunch of snake-oil salesmen claiming to be able to predict earthquakes is far more important than a silly thing like PayPal. Think of it what would happen if these "geoForecaster" folks falsely predicted a major earthquake would happen, causing all sorts of problems by people freaking out.
I'm old enough to remember extremely well the time that crackpot (Iben Browning I think his name was?) predicted a major earthquake in the New Madrid seismic zone here in southeast Missouri. The amount of absolute ignorance that caused was astounding. I remember my school going to the great trouble to get *everything* bolted to the walls, and we started having earthquake drills too.
The bottom line is nobody can predict earthquakes yet, and someone claiming to be able to without publishing their findings in a peer-reviewed journal is just blowing smoke.
Or, you could call Nintendo up and ask for one. A friend of mine got a hold of an old nintendo with the worn out pin connectors, and he really wanted to play it. So, he actually called up Nintendo, told them he was an electrical engineering student (total B.S., he was really a geology major) interested in playing around with a Nintendo to see how it worked and to hack around with it and such. The guy he was talking to bought the story completely and agreed to ship a replacement pin connector to him free of charge. No Joke.
I happen to live in Missouri, so I am hoping this goes through. I have heard rumors in the past about such legislation being proposed. One thing I want to know is what are the exceptions. Missouri currently has a no-call list, but there are certain exceptions to this (like alma maters calling you and hitting you up for money). However, I really can't see the majority of people actually taking up violations in court. Hell, a lot of times the spam just gets bounced through some unsuspecting person's insecure mail server. What happens in this case?
Is it just me, or does the enemy in that last screenshot you linked from your post look conspicuously like another type of alien we all know and love.