The enamel of his adult teeth may have stopped interchanging carbon with the environment after the enamel stopped growing (around age 10-13, but with some variation). But I'm not sure on that point, and it would be highly susceptible to contamination by modern bacteria.
What is commonly done with teeth is to study the oxygen and strontium stable isotope ratios, which gives you information about the latitude where the teeth's owner grew them (proxied by the oxygen isotope profile due to temperature of the oceans where their rainwater evaporated from), and the bedrock chemistry of the area where the owner's food was grown. That can give you some reasonably precise (or very imprecise) indications of where the owner grew the teeth. The oxygen and strontium are much less geochemically mobile than carbon. But even so, the technique often produces null results. It's very cutting edge.
You'll note that this is a stable isotope technique. No dating information.
Dating the birth of a person who interchanges the atoms in their flesh several times a year and the mineral atoms in their bones very couple of years is very difficult. If you hear CSI: Middle Earth telling you they can do this (in a few hours even!), then turn your isotope geochemistry Bullshit Detector up to howl-round.
I find the date 31-Dec suspicious. It is by no means uncommon for people to not know the day or year of their birth, and it is by no means uncommon for "the authorities" when they meet such a case to issue a card with a vaguely believable date. So if the card were issued in 1970 to someone who looked anywhere near 100, then "1870-12-31" would have been a perfectly reasonable guess.
Recently (last month or so), I saw a list of "100 things that people believe are true about personal names, but are not always true" which started with the idea "a person has a name by which they are recognised". I believe it was brought up in a discussion on here about the problems of handling name data in databases. Strange though it sounds to to our ears, there is no reason to expect that someone's family ever recorded their birthdate, not even to a season. And if your family and friends don't know even the time of year you were born, let alone the actual year, why should you care?
Hmmm, I wonder if online translation systems could give a hint as to how many languages do not have a translation for "birthday". That would flag if... well, what proportion of "central Java" languages have good, accurate, dictionaries? 50%? 10%?
On the other, I can't imagine how terrible it would be to out live everyone you care about.
The summary gave a list of people he'd outlived. It didn't say that he'd lost the ability to form new relationships (and 4 wives suggests that wasn't the case), or even to care about people he wasn't directly related to.
Think about the pace of life when he was a young adult compared to now.
What an exhilarating challenge!
I think you've told us more about yourself than the subject of the article.
And not all people stick to one account for their whole lives.
I can understand why having multiple identities might appeal to some - you can be your own sock-puppet for example. But if you're planning such shenanigans, why not set up a half-dozen accounts at the same time? Surely that would occur to the "nerds" for whom this site was originally targetted.
IIRC, JC@137 once said that he was inactive for a number of years, but I've never been inactive for more than a couple of weeks. (Well, I may have spent longer without commenting, but not without logging on and reading.)
If you were truly around in the days of 3- and low-4- digit UIDs, then it's a very close question if there was a "community" to learn about then.
I was told of the site by a friend one day - probably a few days after it was opened - who showed me a couple of threads. So when I went home and fired up the modem, I decided to log on and set up an account. By that point, I'd seen enough about it to have a fair idea of what I was letting myself in for.
The bank is a hell of a lot less likely to burn down
Probably true, what with workplace regulations on fire protection etc.
or float away than your house is.
Ah, now that's a deal more dubious. Particularly if you mean "get flooded" as a subset of "float away".
Banks tend to be in towns ; towns are frequently built alongside or along both sides of rivers ; rivers tend to flood. You need to check your bank's location and look at historical records (pre-historical if you've only got a millennium or two of written records) of flooding, then be utterly ruthless. (The same strategy is good for seeking living accommodation too.)
duplicate located in a remote site if your internet connection can handle it or located at your neighbours house if not.
Not if your neighbour is in the same building as you (what we call here "terraced" or "semi-detached" housing), no. I used to keep my offsite backup at my friends house, about 15 minutes walk down the road. Or maybe a work colleague who lives some distance away.
Far, far more efficient to not get lost in the first case. If you're sufficiently organised to maintain your comms hardware, safety equipment and training standards for all people on board (including firing or divorcing those who fail their safety tests), then your lifecraft (plural) contain 14 days of water, more food, fishing gear, rain-collecting equipment, and everyone knows how to use the equipment.
If, on the other hand, you are too cheap or too lazy to get the gear, get the training, apply the training, test the trained people and then get rid of those who fail to show that they understand the training... then you're probably not going to get this non-standard equipment, and even if you did get it, the only person who actually knows how to use it will die leaving everyone else to starve.
Lifeboat equipment is well thought out, well designed, and more than capable of keeping the users alive for a long time. The "human factors" of not getting the equipment, not maintaining it (e.g. changing the water & food every couple of years), not training in it's use, and not testing competence in actually using the equipment are much more likely to kill you than the need for new equipment.
This is an interesting toy. But it won't replace the rain-collecting ports stitched into the shrouds of liferafts, or the hundreds of sealed plastic bags of drinking water to ration to people from the liferaft's supply.
What do you do for locations that don't have a street view image, or for that matter a street address? For example, places that are many miles from any sort of road (or even footpath)?
Losing Redmond would have resulted in a lot of M$ executives hands touching a lot of arses. (In the sense of "couldn't find his own arse using both hands". Other more scatological interpretations are plausible, but not what I'd defend in court.)
An informative and considered contribution, for which I thank you.
But it [Wikipedia] isn't [reliable], not with the current editing policies. Something needs to be done.
I don't disagree with you - and I'm pretty careful to double-check Wikipedia stuff before relying on it. (I carry an archive with me currently comprising "37,276 items, totalling 56.2 GB" of peer-reviewed papers and books, for those months when I am at work and don't have more than a 9600bps Iridium link to the Internet, including the rest of my archive.)
However, having been signed up for Wikipedia's predecessor (in some senses - the line of descent is not simple), Nupedia, I wonder what your proposals for fixing the problems are. Other things have been tried, and the Wikipedia model, flawed though it is, has at least got copy out there.
If that's the case, where did the screenshot of a "map pin" icon in the North Pacific come from. (Be careful if you allege image manipulation - El Reg has a.co.uk address which would mean that you're subject to UK libel law.) It's hard to see how that isn't using erroneous location data in some sense.
and somehow screwed up prioritizing the most reliable sources first.
And this makes it better, how? That's a pretty fundamental fuck-up.
If you read the original article (OP here - yes, I did RTFA), M$ do make something like this excuse. But it is still bad practice to have quality of data that varies so drastically.
To me, it speaks of someone at a fairly senior level trying to get something done on the cheap (a screen-scraper was suggested up-thread). But even so, it beggars belief that they didn't already have good quality data for such a question, or that if they had better quality data, they didn't use it. Some really bad decision making there.
The last time I saw one of those was in 1999, when I was eclipse-chasing on the Continent. I wonder if they could do enough business to justify the ground rent these days. I couldn't find any when I was last working in the Netherlands, but I didn't spend much time looking.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, religious nut jobs are real too.
What is commonly done with teeth is to study the oxygen and strontium stable isotope ratios, which gives you information about the latitude where the teeth's owner grew them (proxied by the oxygen isotope profile due to temperature of the oceans where their rainwater evaporated from), and the bedrock chemistry of the area where the owner's food was grown. That can give you some reasonably precise (or very imprecise) indications of where the owner grew the teeth. The oxygen and strontium are much less geochemically mobile than carbon. But even so, the technique often produces null results. It's very cutting edge.
You'll note that this is a stable isotope technique. No dating information.
Dating the birth of a person who interchanges the atoms in their flesh several times a year and the mineral atoms in their bones very couple of years is very difficult. If you hear CSI: Middle Earth telling you they can do this (in a few hours even!), then turn your isotope geochemistry Bullshit Detector up to howl-round.
I find the date 31-Dec suspicious. It is by no means uncommon for people to not know the day or year of their birth, and it is by no means uncommon for "the authorities" when they meet such a case to issue a card with a vaguely believable date. So if the card were issued in 1970 to someone who looked anywhere near 100, then "1870-12-31" would have been a perfectly reasonable guess.
Recently (last month or so), I saw a list of "100 things that people believe are true about personal names, but are not always true" which started with the idea "a person has a name by which they are recognised". I believe it was brought up in a discussion on here about the problems of handling name data in databases. Strange though it sounds to to our ears, there is no reason to expect that someone's family ever recorded their birthdate, not even to a season. And if your family and friends don't know even the time of year you were born, let alone the actual year, why should you care?
Hmmm, I wonder if online translation systems could give a hint as to how many languages do not have a translation for "birthday". That would flag if ... well, what proportion of "central Java" languages have good, accurate, dictionaries? 50%? 10%?
What is it with people thinking that Java is now a part of the Soviet Union? Or Russian Federation, or whatever you want to call it this decade.
The summary gave a list of people he'd outlived. It didn't say that he'd lost the ability to form new relationships (and 4 wives suggests that wasn't the case), or even to care about people he wasn't directly related to.
What an exhilarating challenge!
I think you've told us more about yourself than the subject of the article.
Russian?
Dying while leaping from the mantelshelf into a bed full of expectant sex partners seems to be the favoured way of "going out with style".
I can understand why having multiple identities might appeal to some - you can be your own sock-puppet for example. But if you're planning such shenanigans, why not set up a half-dozen accounts at the same time? Surely that would occur to the "nerds" for whom this site was originally targetted.
I've always been a little suspicious of the length of UID appearing these days, and wonder if they have some less predictable scheme these days.
IIRC, JC@137 once said that he was inactive for a number of years, but I've never been inactive for more than a couple of weeks. (Well, I may have spent longer without commenting, but not without logging on and reading.)
I was told of the site by a friend one day - probably a few days after it was opened - who showed me a couple of threads. So when I went home and fired up the modem, I decided to log on and set up an account. By that point, I'd seen enough about it to have a fair idea of what I was letting myself in for.
Probably true, what with workplace regulations on fire protection etc.
Ah, now that's a deal more dubious. Particularly if you mean "get flooded" as a subset of "float away".
Banks tend to be in towns ; towns are frequently built alongside or along both sides of rivers ; rivers tend to flood. You need to check your bank's location and look at historical records (pre-historical if you've only got a millennium or two of written records) of flooding, then be utterly ruthless. (The same strategy is good for seeking living accommodation too.)
Not if your neighbour is in the same building as you (what we call here "terraced" or "semi-detached" housing), no. I used to keep my offsite backup at my friends house, about 15 minutes walk down the road. Or maybe a work colleague who lives some distance away.
Otherwise, the 3-2-1 principle works fine.
If, on the other hand, you are too cheap or too lazy to get the gear, get the training, apply the training, test the trained people and then get rid of those who fail to show that they understand the training ... then you're probably not going to get this non-standard equipment, and even if you did get it, the only person who actually knows how to use it will die leaving everyone else to starve.
Lifeboat equipment is well thought out, well designed, and more than capable of keeping the users alive for a long time. The "human factors" of not getting the equipment, not maintaining it (e.g. changing the water & food every couple of years), not training in it's use, and not testing competence in actually using the equipment are much more likely to kill you than the need for new equipment.
This is an interesting toy. But it won't replace the rain-collecting ports stitched into the shrouds of liferafts, or the hundreds of sealed plastic bags of drinking water to ration to people from the liferaft's supply.
More so than JoeRandomWebsite ? I've not noticed.
What do you do for locations that don't have a street view image, or for that matter a street address? For example, places that are many miles from any sort of road (or even footpath)?
Incidentally, how does your hippocampus activity compare to a Knowledge-tested taxi driver?
Losing Redmond would have resulted in a lot of M$ executives hands touching a lot of arses. (In the sense of "couldn't find his own arse using both hands". Other more scatological interpretations are plausible, but not what I'd defend in court.)
An informative and considered contribution, for which I thank you.
I don't disagree with you - and I'm pretty careful to double-check Wikipedia stuff before relying on it. (I carry an archive with me currently comprising "37,276 items, totalling 56.2 GB" of peer-reviewed papers and books, for those months when I am at work and don't have more than a 9600bps Iridium link to the Internet, including the rest of my archive.)
However, having been signed up for Wikipedia's predecessor (in some senses - the line of descent is not simple), Nupedia, I wonder what your proposals for fixing the problems are. Other things have been tried, and the Wikipedia model, flawed though it is, has at least got copy out there.
If that's the case, where did the screenshot of a "map pin" icon in the North Pacific come from. (Be careful if you allege image manipulation - El Reg has a .co.uk address which would mean that you're subject to UK libel law.) It's hard to see how that isn't using erroneous location data in some sense.
And this makes it better, how? That's a pretty fundamental fuck-up.
If you read the original article (OP here - yes, I did RTFA), M$ do make something like this excuse. But it is still bad practice to have quality of data that varies so drastically.
To me, it speaks of someone at a fairly senior level trying to get something done on the cheap (a screen-scraper was suggested up-thread). But even so, it beggars belief that they didn't already have good quality data for such a question, or that if they had better quality data, they didn't use it. Some really bad decision making there.
The last time I saw one of those was in 1999, when I was eclipse-chasing on the Continent. I wonder if they could do enough business to justify the ground rent these days. I couldn't find any when I was last working in the Netherlands, but I didn't spend much time looking.
Ha ha - more fun than pulling the wings off flies, and more ethically justifiable.
Bing has a non-maps function? Errr, why?
SELF : gets cheese and nuts (much nicer than popcorn) to read how this works.