Peas and mash is a well-known fast food in some parts of the world. Specifically West Yorkshire and possibly over the border into Lancashire ; possibly other areas.
It's perfectly palatable. A bit of graaaaaaaavy too, that'll be fine.
The dating technique (uranium series dating) is good. Very solid ; very appropriate for the age range under consideration (where carbon-14 dating is getting towards it's inherent limits).
As always with real-world samples, the bigger question is whether you've got an appropriate sample. In this case, some of the paintings have a partial overgrowth of calcium carbonate (which will pick up some uranium during deposition, then hopefully "close" as a system). This is the material that you sample, and it gives you a minimum date for the deposition of the overgrowth. The overgrowth that you sample is (your choice) one which encloses and seals-off the pigments of one of the drawings/ paintings, and therefore the minimum age of the overgrowth is also the minimum age of your painting.
Which is nice and simple. Until you get to actually taking the samples. Firstly, these are materials of inestimable value, so your samples are going to be as small as possible, and you're going to spend months or years negotiating over where you're going to sample (witness the palaver over getting bits of the Turin shroud ; but unlike the shroud, this is important). Now, you collect your sample. Is it a coherent film, or a crumbly powder? Have you collected just the overgrowth, or have you got any of the pigment. Is the overgrowth contaminated with a recent, still growing biofilm of bacteria (that's more relevant for carbon dating), or is there still mineral being deposited on one face or the other of the overgrowth by flowing water? That wouldn't invalidate the procedure, but it would increase the size of the error bars on the date calculated.
But these are standard issues to consider. Which is what peer review is for. So, if you have access to the actual paper ($15 for me ; not worth it, because I've got no concerns about the paper), you'll be able to read the details. I note that there are concerns raised about whether the authors made appropriate checks for uranium dissolution from the overgrowths : could be an issue, or it could be something detectable and correctable (I don't have the paper to check), or it could be something that you declare as a problem and live with. I note that the same series of results produces 4 or 5 different dates for different pieces of "artwork", so I'd assume that there is sufficient error analysis in the paper to justify these. Never having had to actually do radiometric dating myself, I'll let the reviewers have their head on it and take the figures at face value. Science's (the journal) journalists are normally careful to say what is in the paper, and to not say what is not in the paper.
I just t believe they be too easily convinced that "the greater good" or "national security" demand that they give the government free access to the system.
So... what you're saying is that if they've sold their souls once, then they're likely to do it again.
(Sounds a bit odd, since souls don't exist ; "moral integrity" might be a better phrase, but "soul" is shorter.)
That also implies a pretty dodgy concept : that when someone leaves military service, then they actually get their soul back. Even if they're more likely to sell it again later. That sounds pretty dodgy to me.
That is why you will see some people refer to modern humans as Homo sapiens sapiens, and Neanderthals as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
From the other end of the same (zoom) telescope, the term "Anatomically Modern Human" is used a lot, particularly in areas where the "modern/ Neanderthal" dichotomy is not established. As a descriptive term, it's much less loaded than implying species membership, breeding isolation and a whole host of other criteria. And if your AMH skeleton is later found to have (say) 40% Neanderthal DNA in it, then your description of it as "AMH" is still correct. It's down to the geneticists to decide where, if anywhere, to draw an intra-specific distinction.
What was that? Denisovans. Oh, we don't do Denisovans here, they're just another race, like "nerd", or "jock", or "Asian" or "European" or "Middle-Easterner". ("Americans" are, of course, "Asians", though there are a lot of "European" and other immigrants.)
While I like the Nicoll quote, it does beg the question of WTF is a
cribhouse whore
; it implies a novel (to me) usage of 'crib', 'house' or 'whore'. Or is this specifically an Americanism that didn't make it's way out of the place under Hayes Rules?
And just how are you going to get your insurance without your ship having been passed as fit-to-insure by one of the accreditation agencies? You know, the ones composed of marine surveyors and engineers with decades of experience in the shipbuilding, repair and salvage industries, who write reports of the form "Ship X is worth no more than Y and is/ is not fit to leave harbour." They're also often the people hired by harbour masters who say "This ship is not fit to enter our harbour. Go away!" (Harbours really get upset if ships sink at the quay, or take fire - it damages their harbour, can damage other shipping customers, and it occupies a berth with a wreck that will cost a lot of money to remove, owned by a shell company who probably can't afford to pay the normal harbour charges, let alone the salvage costs, the harbour's repair costs...)
So, apart from knowing almost nothing about the shipping or insurance industries, your plan for making profit from shipping insurance fraud is lining you up for some jail time. Do you have a song-and-dance act too? It had better be good.
Japan in particular and the eastern edge of Eurasia in general has been getting hit by tsunami for millions of years. This might be the first piece of debris to make it across the ocean in this century, but it certainly isn't the first to ever make it across.
Tree trunks have been used for harbourage for millennia, and they accumulate sealife like anything else in the sea.
Why restrict it to this Sean Penn guy? Around 1/4 of a completely unrelated country half-way round the world also think of the place as the Islas Malvinas. And we'd really prefer not to have to pay for it and it's orphan oil resources.
Well, children tend to share, and share things like pinkeye:-)
It's called conjunctivitis ("pinkeye" may be an Americanism, but I never heard it before now). It's not particularly fun (half of my graduating class were sharing a strain during our finals exam week ; it hurt). It just cost a client around £5000, cost a freelance competitor around £1500 income, and ruined my holiday (I had to drive back to the heliport and lost 2 days of my holiday) while earning me the £1500. Non-trivial.
It's also a good education for the kid, I guess. I've certainly been more careful about sterilising eyepieces regularly since my finals. Naturally, the exams weren't delayed by half the class falling ill. We'd obviously not learned our lab hygiene properly, so it was our fault.
And after looking for 10 minutes, "How much do you want to spend?"
Probably every microscope buyer / seller pair since Leeuwenhoek has been having essentially the same conversation. We have that conversation at work every couple of years.
Unfortunately, how long does it take to do a DoD-3, vs taking the hard drive out and taking it to someone who will put it in a chipper
No where near as long as it will take you to find someone who will actually put it into a suitable chipper, as opposed to someone who says they'll put it into a chipper.
There was a case a couple of months ago when a contractor for a UK hospital group had signed a contract promising to destroy hard drives from computers they were being paid to take away ; naturally the machines reappeared on (IIRC) ebaY, with un-wiped hard drives, medical records, personnel details and a small shitstorm of bad publicity.
If the data must be destroyed, then doing it yourself is really the only option ; if your time is too valuable for even a powerful chipper, then you've got a real problem that you need to budget for. If you're an IT professional then you'll memo for that budget, and if it's declined, pass the buck for the responsibility back up to the manager who refused your budget request and document that. If your management won't take your professional opinion on this, then you need to be job-hunting already.
You may be lucky and have a minion who you can trust to do this. A retiree who'll do it one day a week; someone on medical short-time ; whatever. But if you really need data security, then you need to keep this in-house and amongst people whose professional integrity you trust.
Ah, you're logged into slashdot.org.us ? Yet bizarrely when I'm logged into the international site (slashdot.org), I can also see your comment.
It seems that you've been contaminating your precious bodily fluids by posting to an international site, when you thought that you were posting to a Good Ole All 'Merkin site. My commiserations. I suggest a wire brush and Dettol for decontaminating your fingertips and retinas.
Generally the reasoning behind such things is people are far less likely to outright lie on a linkedin profile where former co-workers and classmates will also see it than on a resume that is only read by a hiring manager and HR.
That is reasonable reasoning. If someone put that explanation to me when saying why they wanted a $NETWORK$ formatted submission, then I'd be pretty happy to comply. If I had an existing account on $NETWORK$ and a few other quibbles.
I have never gotten any spam from LinkedIn or LinkedIn "members'.
Lucky you!
Or perhaps it's a consequence of you being flagged as "retired."
I'm active in my industry, and have a blunt statement in my Linked-In resume that I am not at all interested in receiving job offers that would require me to leave my current employment, though if people have projects they think I'd be suitable for, then they should contact my line manager to discuss rates etc.
I still get around one serious request a week from a headhunting idiot for me to contact them about an "exciting new opportunity". Which gets circular-filed, and reported as abuse through the Linked-in system. Which part of "read my fucking CV?" do these twats not understand? Probably the bit about "read" - if they could do that, they'd be flipping burgers instead of working in head-hunting shops.
With corroborating evidence from a different dataset, measured by different authors, based on trees in Europe and North America.
(I don't have access to the full paper or it's references, but...)
Almost certainly, one of those corroborating sets of data would be from Mike Bailey at QUB (Queens University, Belfast), who has been convinced on dendrochronological grounds that something nasty happened in the late 8th century which hasn't made it directly into the historical record.
I was reading a textbook on dendrochronology written by Bailey at about the time that Slashdot was getting started. To call him a "grand old man of dendrochronology" would be nothing less than accurate. He must be close to retirement by now.
[SIGH] C14 is unstable : it goes away (well, changes into something that is NOT C14) pretty rapidly. Any random nucleus of C14 has a 50% chance of decaying into something else in a period of 6400 (approx) years.
Unless you have some process that is carefully making C14 on your meteor, immediately before you use it, then you will not have a significant content of C14 by the time that you come to "use" your meteor in a collision. After ten half-lives (64,000 years, or about half the duration of the human species on Earth ; a geological eyeblink), your meteor has one thousandth of the C14 you carefully accumulated on it.
(There may possibly be things you can do to accelerate this decay ; there's nothing that can retard the decay.)
Would this mean carbon dating is inaccurate for items older than 1300 years?
No. Because for over 30 years now, carbon dating has been done by comparing carbon isotope ratios with samples of known age (tree-ring samples, counted back from the present day and dated to a precision of <0.5 years). This allows the system to be robust against natural variations in the production rate of C14, including this "spike". The abstract includes a note that the spike in C14 would be consistent with existing C14 calibration curves if there was 10 years of averaging in the sampling process.
Time to redate the Shroud of Turin?
No. It's a fake that was made about 500 years after the event under discussion and so is unlikely to have been affected at all by this event. It's ability to extract money and devotion from the credulous remains undiminished by this, at least for the moment.
Light pollution is everywhere these days, I've had astronomy as a hobby for a couple of years and still haven't had the chance to see a proper sky.
Don't make excuses. Go somewhere with a decently dark sky and experience it. Which part of "don't make excuses" was unclear?
But a better sky is good enough! Grab Stellarium (.org) for free and check what's out there.
This is not an adequate substitute for the experience of seeing a properly dark sky, and saying to the universe in general "Mine! It's all mine!"
Some years ago I had a friend who lived 25 miles outside the city I live in (around 300,000 population ; substantial but not gigantic). One night, actually when Comet Hyakutake was doing it's screamer across the sky, I turned up at his house bearing a packet of weed, a small barrel of beer, a hand-held telescope, and a couple of camping mats. In between tokes, and glugs, and eyes on the telescope we watched a phenomenal comet, and I pointed out constellations, the Orion Nebula and various other things. And finally our eyes were dark-adapted enough to see the Milky Way. My friend had lived there for 15 years, and always thought the sky was too light-polluted to see the Milky Way ; in reality, he'd never let his eyes get sufficiently dark-adapted.
Having said that, it was also bloody cold that night.
Slashdot Mirror
It's perfectly palatable. A bit of graaaaaaaavy too, that'll be fine.
Which matters .. how?
Shock! Horror! Users don't RTFM. Sky Falls.
As always with real-world samples, the bigger question is whether you've got an appropriate sample. In this case, some of the paintings have a partial overgrowth of calcium carbonate (which will pick up some uranium during deposition, then hopefully "close" as a system). This is the material that you sample, and it gives you a minimum date for the deposition of the overgrowth. The overgrowth that you sample is (your choice) one which encloses and seals-off the pigments of one of the drawings/ paintings, and therefore the minimum age of the overgrowth is also the minimum age of your painting.
Which is nice and simple. Until you get to actually taking the samples. Firstly, these are materials of inestimable value, so your samples are going to be as small as possible, and you're going to spend months or years negotiating over where you're going to sample (witness the palaver over getting bits of the Turin shroud ; but unlike the shroud, this is important). Now, you collect your sample. Is it a coherent film, or a crumbly powder? Have you collected just the overgrowth, or have you got any of the pigment. Is the overgrowth contaminated with a recent, still growing biofilm of bacteria (that's more relevant for carbon dating), or is there still mineral being deposited on one face or the other of the overgrowth by flowing water? That wouldn't invalidate the procedure, but it would increase the size of the error bars on the date calculated.
But these are standard issues to consider. Which is what peer review is for. So, if you have access to the actual paper ($15 for me ; not worth it, because I've got no concerns about the paper), you'll be able to read the details. I note that there are concerns raised about whether the authors made appropriate checks for uranium dissolution from the overgrowths : could be an issue, or it could be something detectable and correctable (I don't have the paper to check), or it could be something that you declare as a problem and live with. I note that the same series of results produces 4 or 5 different dates for different pieces of "artwork", so I'd assume that there is sufficient error analysis in the paper to justify these. Never having had to actually do radiometric dating myself, I'll let the reviewers have their head on it and take the figures at face value. Science's (the journal) journalists are normally careful to say what is in the paper, and to not say what is not in the paper.
So ... what you're saying is that if they've sold their souls once, then they're likely to do it again.
(Sounds a bit odd, since souls don't exist ; "moral integrity" might be a better phrase, but "soul" is shorter.)
That also implies a pretty dodgy concept : that when someone leaves military service, then they actually get their soul back. Even if they're more likely to sell it again later. That sounds pretty dodgy to me.
From the other end of the same (zoom) telescope, the term "Anatomically Modern Human" is used a lot, particularly in areas where the "modern/ Neanderthal" dichotomy is not established. As a descriptive term, it's much less loaded than implying species membership, breeding isolation and a whole host of other criteria. And if your AMH skeleton is later found to have (say) 40% Neanderthal DNA in it, then your description of it as "AMH" is still correct. It's down to the geneticists to decide where, if anywhere, to draw an intra-specific distinction.
What was that? Denisovans. Oh, we don't do Denisovans here, they're just another race, like "nerd", or "jock", or "Asian" or "European" or "Middle-Easterner". ("Americans" are, of course, "Asians", though there are a lot of "European" and other immigrants.)
; it implies a novel (to me) usage of 'crib', 'house' or 'whore'. Or is this specifically an Americanism that didn't make it's way out of the place under Hayes Rules?
So, apart from knowing almost nothing about the shipping or insurance industries, your plan for making profit from shipping insurance fraud is lining you up for some jail time. Do you have a song-and-dance act too? It had better be good.
That's my excuse. In reality, I doubt my linguistic ability to sufficiently plumb the depths of the barrel from which that was scraped.
On a scale of "zero" to "bad" ... that doesn't fit.
In future years you'll need to cover the costs of the award by publishing video of the stick being inserted.
No, you don't get to choose where.
Tree trunks have been used for harbourage for millennia, and they accumulate sealife like anything else in the sea.
Why restrict it to this Sean Penn guy? Around 1/4 of a completely unrelated country half-way round the world also think of the place as the Islas Malvinas. And we'd really prefer not to have to pay for it and it's orphan oil resources.
It's called conjunctivitis ("pinkeye" may be an Americanism, but I never heard it before now). It's not particularly fun (half of my graduating class were sharing a strain during our finals exam week ; it hurt). It just cost a client around £5000, cost a freelance competitor around £1500 income, and ruined my holiday (I had to drive back to the heliport and lost 2 days of my holiday) while earning me the £1500. Non-trivial.
It's also a good education for the kid, I guess. I've certainly been more careful about sterilising eyepieces regularly since my finals. Naturally, the exams weren't delayed by half the class falling ill. We'd obviously not learned our lab hygiene properly, so it was our fault.
Probably every microscope buyer / seller pair since Leeuwenhoek has been having essentially the same conversation. We have that conversation at work every couple of years.
If you put your terrarium inside an aquarium (with a lid on, of course!) ... is it ... oh, never mind.
No where near as long as it will take you to find someone who will actually put it into a suitable chipper, as opposed to someone who says they'll put it into a chipper.
There was a case a couple of months ago when a contractor for a UK hospital group had signed a contract promising to destroy hard drives from computers they were being paid to take away ; naturally the machines reappeared on (IIRC) ebaY, with un-wiped hard drives, medical records, personnel details and a small shitstorm of bad publicity.
If the data must be destroyed, then doing it yourself is really the only option ; if your time is too valuable for even a powerful chipper, then you've got a real problem that you need to budget for. If you're an IT professional then you'll memo for that budget, and if it's declined, pass the buck for the responsibility back up to the manager who refused your budget request and document that. If your management won't take your professional opinion on this, then you need to be job-hunting already.
You may be lucky and have a minion who you can trust to do this. A retiree who'll do it one day a week; someone on medical short-time ; whatever. But if you really need data security, then you need to keep this in-house and amongst people whose professional integrity you trust.
Ah, you're logged into slashdot.org.us ? Yet bizarrely when I'm logged into the international site (slashdot.org), I can also see your comment.
It seems that you've been contaminating your precious bodily fluids by posting to an international site, when you thought that you were posting to a Good Ole All 'Merkin site. My commiserations. I suggest a wire brush and Dettol for decontaminating your fingertips and retinas.
That is reasonable reasoning. If someone put that explanation to me when saying why they wanted a $NETWORK$ formatted submission, then I'd be pretty happy to comply. If I had an existing account on $NETWORK$ and a few other quibbles.
Lucky you!
Or perhaps it's a consequence of you being flagged as "retired."
I'm active in my industry, and have a blunt statement in my Linked-In resume that I am not at all interested in receiving job offers that would require me to leave my current employment, though if people have projects they think I'd be suitable for, then they should contact my line manager to discuss rates etc.
I still get around one serious request a week from a headhunting idiot for me to contact them about an "exciting new opportunity". Which gets circular-filed, and reported as abuse through the Linked-in system. Which part of "read my fucking CV?" do these twats not understand? Probably the bit about "read" - if they could do that, they'd be flipping burgers instead of working in head-hunting shops.
Oh, so you believe Australians now? Over the word of good old American whack-jobs? what sort of a communist are you anyway?
(I don't have access to the full paper or it's references, but ...)
Almost certainly, one of those corroborating sets of data would be from Mike Bailey at QUB (Queens University, Belfast), who has been convinced on dendrochronological grounds that something nasty happened in the late 8th century which hasn't made it directly into the historical record.
I was reading a textbook on dendrochronology written by Bailey at about the time that Slashdot was getting started. To call him a "grand old man of dendrochronology" would be nothing less than accurate. He must be close to retirement by now.
[SIGH] C14 is unstable : it goes away (well, changes into something that is NOT C14) pretty rapidly. Any random nucleus of C14 has a 50% chance of decaying into something else in a period of 6400 (approx) years.
Unless you have some process that is carefully making C14 on your meteor, immediately before you use it, then you will not have a significant content of C14 by the time that you come to "use" your meteor in a collision. After ten half-lives (64,000 years, or about half the duration of the human species on Earth ; a geological eyeblink), your meteor has one thousandth of the C14 you carefully accumulated on it.
(There may possibly be things you can do to accelerate this decay ; there's nothing that can retard the decay.)
That some people hold those beliefs to actually be true is them being demeaning - of themselves.
No. Because for over 30 years now, carbon dating has been done by comparing carbon isotope ratios with samples of known age (tree-ring samples, counted back from the present day and dated to a precision of <0.5 years). This allows the system to be robust against natural variations in the production rate of C14, including this "spike". The abstract includes a note that the spike in C14 would be consistent with existing C14 calibration curves if there was 10 years of averaging in the sampling process.
No. It's a fake that was made about 500 years after the event under discussion and so is unlikely to have been affected at all by this event. It's ability to extract money and devotion from the credulous remains undiminished by this, at least for the moment.
Don't make excuses. Go somewhere with a decently dark sky and experience it. Which part of "don't make excuses" was unclear?
This is not an adequate substitute for the experience of seeing a properly dark sky, and saying to the universe in general "Mine! It's all mine!"
Some years ago I had a friend who lived 25 miles outside the city I live in (around 300,000 population ; substantial but not gigantic). One night, actually when Comet Hyakutake was doing it's screamer across the sky, I turned up at his house bearing a packet of weed, a small barrel of beer, a hand-held telescope, and a couple of camping mats. In between tokes, and glugs, and eyes on the telescope we watched a phenomenal comet, and I pointed out constellations, the Orion Nebula and various other things. And finally our eyes were dark-adapted enough to see the Milky Way. My friend had lived there for 15 years, and always thought the sky was too light-polluted to see the Milky Way ; in reality, he'd never let his eyes get sufficiently dark-adapted.
Having said that, it was also bloody cold that night.