That's for Carbon 14 dating. 14C has a half-life of 5,730 years, so after 80,000 years, it's essentially all gone.
This article isn't about dating at all, in that sense. Carbon 13 and Carbon 12 are stable. But plants preferentially incorporate Carbon 12, unless they're growing so fast that they take whatever carbon they get.
So when you see more 13C in some sediment you know that plants are growing faster. When you date the sediment (using other techniques, like uranium dating or argon/argon dating) you know a little bit about the plants growing at the time, and the atmosphere they were growing in.
The title of the Slashdot article is extremely misleading. The article it links to is rather clearer.
Because the creationists have been pushing an untenable decision for quite some time, using extremely dubious tactics. They've achieved a disturbing amount of political success by exploiting people's ignorance of science.
Imagine how much they can accomplish when they can point to scientists actually being wrong about something. Never mind that it does nothing to bolster their position. All they need is to sow doubt about science.
Scientifically, this is merely interesting. Politically, it's an immense hassle on a battle which wastes a huge amount of time with zero scientific merit.
So yeah, you're gonna get some bitching when this sort of thing happens.
You're right, it was hyperbole. But it's an important heuristic for young people to learn: when a non-scientist contradicts what every scientist is saying, you need to probe deeply to figure out why this person thinks they have knowledge that has eluded the experts.
That goes doubly for a non-scientist with an agenda. I'd love to see science students taught how to recognize pseudo-science, but I suspect such a class would step on too many toes.
It's not unquestionable. However, "questions" can be misleading in and of themselves, especially when they come from a teacher. This particular question came with a subtext of "Not only don't I know, but they don't know either," which is false.
The appeal to authority is not proof, but it is a useful heuristic. Science is a time-consuming activity, and when a person without credentials suggests that something is wrong, it's more likely that they are wrong about the state of knowledge than that they've discovered in a short time what many, many other people have devoted a lot of time to.
That's doubly true when the questioner is known to promote an anti-scientific agenda, which has been demonstrated to ignore facts to suit its agenda.
You're correct. I exaggerated. You don't need formal education to question scientific theories or to produce useful research.
The credentials do, however, imply a certain amount of vetting by other scientists that when you speak, you're not speaking from ignorance. When a large number of scientists say one thing, and an uncredentialed person contradicts them, that person is very likely to be wrong unless they can point to specific evidence for it.
If there's a need for a mutex in a multi-threaded app, how do they get around it in the multi-process app? Couldn't they just do the same thing in the multi-thread app?
I understand how a multi-process design provides a better level of isolation for the application, but I don't see how it helps with any of the other vast complexities of parallel programming. If anything, it should make some kinds of communication harder.
I'm merely objecting to the false statement that scientists are promulgating something as fact (uranium dating) that they don't understand when in fact they DO understand it.
Skepticism is good and necessary, but it must be followed up by research. Saying that you don't know the answer is valid. Implying that scientists don't know, when they DO know and you don't, is not.
You can encourage the kids to go double-check the answers, and then expand on them. I'm just concerned that his statement was taken as "Those scientists make a lot of statements that they can't back up," and that's wrong.
The trick with uranium dating is that when zircon crystals form, uranium is trapped but lead is excluded. So you know that all of the lead was created AFTER the crystal formed.
This is cross-checked against other forms of dating, too.
The disappointing thing is that your science teacher was spreading doubt on the subject when the answers were out there to be found. When a vast number of scientists say it's true, "I don't think it's right" is not a valid answer unless you've got a PhD. He may not have been spreading religion, but he was spreading doubt about a well-founded science, as if the scientists themselves were ignorant of it. They are not, and it's extremely bad form to imply that they are.
You probably can't even get Ghostbusters down at your local "Three DVDs for $20" guy on the corner; his stock is all newer. Everybody who wants this movie already has it. I can't even imagine who they expect to sell it to, except as a novelty.
Presumably they're keeping an eye on how long it will take for the DRM to be broken. People will break it for the challenge and because they hate DRM, but it's like stealing cockroaches from my kitchen: you're welcome to it.
The most obvious explanation is that only the "fittest" men get to have multiple wives in the first place. They'll tend to be richer, and rich men live longer. They said they accounted for socioeconomic differences, but might it also be that physically fit men lived longer and attracted more wives?
I'm sure they tried to control for that and a host of other factors, but I'd really need to see the original paper to understand their work.
Unfortunately, in some places, the local clubs mostly book the sort of music the RIAA has been spoon-feeding us for years. It's a vicious cycle: people buy the labels' music, causing clubs to play it, causing people to think that's the best music out there, and buying more focus-grouped music.
According to a musician friend of mine, the DC area is particularly bad at that. If you want better music, move to Detroit. But then you have to live in Detroit.
Think of it this way: a lawnmower is mostly empty space. Care to stick your hand in one?
In the Bohr model you can think of it as the electrons zipping around and eventually coming within the zone populated by the electrons in membrane. Remember, the electron has an area of influence considerably bigger than the electron itself. And the entire outer surface of an atom/molecule is coated with electrons in a cloud much larger than the n, so the net effect is of a negative charge (unless some electrons are missing, in which case you get chemical reactions). Those negative charges repel.
What's actually going on is much weirder and more complex; the electron is kind of "smeared out" rather than zipping from place to place. But you get the gist.
You get to charge a lot of money for your skills not because they took so long to develop, but because the years of development means that your skills are rare.
Musicians, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen. The world is full of skilled musicians. It's even full of skilled musicians who can put on a good show, though stagecraft is rarer than people think.
The real skill on that side is in getting people to all want one particular song. The record companies used to be pretty good at that, through a combination of skilled production, skilled marketing, and collusion with radio stations. Nobody listens to the radio any more, and skilled production comes free with an iMac.
Marketing is still a wide-open field. Maybe somebody will figure it out.
Good point about the places where interest-only loans can be valuable. I knew there must be a non-scam reason for them to exist. But I suspect more were written to speculators than to people with variable incomes.
The article says that he was doing 62 MPH according to the radar gun. The GPS says 45. If the GPS was right, why was the gun wrong? Bad calibration? Operator error? Dyslexia?
How many other people were caught "speeding" by the same gun,and are they planning to notify any of them that they have reason to believe the gun was wrong?
Re:Awesome response posted on Washingtonpost.com
on
Send the ISS To the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is disappointing that the Washington Post would run something like this without running it past at least one person with an engineering degree.
According to the Wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Benson), he's an writer and filmmaker. The closest thing he has to a qualification is a book of reprocessed images from space probes.
Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes.
Yes, I'm sure it's the same guy. Both the article and this wiki page cite the same book. Also, the Wiki page says he's "living in Slovenia", and the article includes a.si email address.
It is entirely reasonable to bring up ID in the same way as alchemy and Aristotelian physics. With a similar result, that science has refuted Aristotlean physics and that ID is not a scientific pursuit.
That result will make people scream, and tacking on "we don't know first causes, and with respect to them ID isn't actually wrong, merely scientifically useless" isn't going to mollify them.
If you thought they hated leaving out creationism, wait until you hear how they feel about having it actively refuted in class.
U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.
This was old yellowcake from the first Iraqi attempt at a nuke plant (which the Israelis bombed in 1981). Saddam couldn't use it because there were UN inspectors watching it.
So it was plausible that he might want some, but not true that he tried to get it from Niger. That was concocted evidence.
The description is crucial; the claims are just the specific of what they claim as novel. But the description has to tell how they do it, and in doing so usually does a much better job of telling you what it really is.
Slashdot Mirror
That's for Carbon 14 dating. 14C has a half-life of 5,730 years, so after 80,000 years, it's essentially all gone.
This article isn't about dating at all, in that sense. Carbon 13 and Carbon 12 are stable. But plants preferentially incorporate Carbon 12, unless they're growing so fast that they take whatever carbon they get.
So when you see more 13C in some sediment you know that plants are growing faster. When you date the sediment (using other techniques, like uranium dating or argon/argon dating) you know a little bit about the plants growing at the time, and the atmosphere they were growing in.
The title of the Slashdot article is extremely misleading. The article it links to is rather clearer.
Because the creationists have been pushing an untenable decision for quite some time, using extremely dubious tactics. They've achieved a disturbing amount of political success by exploiting people's ignorance of science.
Imagine how much they can accomplish when they can point to scientists actually being wrong about something. Never mind that it does nothing to bolster their position. All they need is to sow doubt about science.
Scientifically, this is merely interesting. Politically, it's an immense hassle on a battle which wastes a huge amount of time with zero scientific merit.
So yeah, you're gonna get some bitching when this sort of thing happens.
You're right, it was hyperbole. But it's an important heuristic for young people to learn: when a non-scientist contradicts what every scientist is saying, you need to probe deeply to figure out why this person thinks they have knowledge that has eluded the experts.
That goes doubly for a non-scientist with an agenda. I'd love to see science students taught how to recognize pseudo-science, but I suspect such a class would step on too many toes.
It's not unquestionable. However, "questions" can be misleading in and of themselves, especially when they come from a teacher. This particular question came with a subtext of "Not only don't I know, but they don't know either," which is false.
The appeal to authority is not proof, but it is a useful heuristic. Science is a time-consuming activity, and when a person without credentials suggests that something is wrong, it's more likely that they are wrong about the state of knowledge than that they've discovered in a short time what many, many other people have devoted a lot of time to.
That's doubly true when the questioner is known to promote an anti-scientific agenda, which has been demonstrated to ignore facts to suit its agenda.
You're correct. I exaggerated. You don't need formal education to question scientific theories or to produce useful research.
The credentials do, however, imply a certain amount of vetting by other scientists that when you speak, you're not speaking from ignorance. When a large number of scientists say one thing, and an uncredentialed person contradicts them, that person is very likely to be wrong unless they can point to specific evidence for it.
If there's a need for a mutex in a multi-threaded app, how do they get around it in the multi-process app? Couldn't they just do the same thing in the multi-thread app?
I understand how a multi-process design provides a better level of isolation for the application, but I don't see how it helps with any of the other vast complexities of parallel programming. If anything, it should make some kinds of communication harder.
The teacher did raise good questions.
I'm merely objecting to the false statement that scientists are promulgating something as fact (uranium dating) that they don't understand when in fact they DO understand it.
Skepticism is good and necessary, but it must be followed up by research. Saying that you don't know the answer is valid. Implying that scientists don't know, when they DO know and you don't, is not.
You can encourage the kids to go double-check the answers, and then expand on them. I'm just concerned that his statement was taken as "Those scientists make a lot of statements that they can't back up," and that's wrong.
The trick with uranium dating is that when zircon crystals form, uranium is trapped but lead is excluded. So you know that all of the lead was created AFTER the crystal formed.
This is cross-checked against other forms of dating, too.
The disappointing thing is that your science teacher was spreading doubt on the subject when the answers were out there to be found. When a vast number of scientists say it's true, "I don't think it's right" is not a valid answer unless you've got a PhD. He may not have been spreading religion, but he was spreading doubt about a well-founded science, as if the scientists themselves were ignorant of it. They are not, and it's extremely bad form to imply that they are.
You probably can't even get Ghostbusters down at your local "Three DVDs for $20" guy on the corner; his stock is all newer. Everybody who wants this movie already has it. I can't even imagine who they expect to sell it to, except as a novelty.
Presumably they're keeping an eye on how long it will take for the DRM to be broken. People will break it for the challenge and because they hate DRM, but it's like stealing cockroaches from my kitchen: you're welcome to it.
The most obvious explanation is that only the "fittest" men get to have multiple wives in the first place. They'll tend to be richer, and rich men live longer. They said they accounted for socioeconomic differences, but might it also be that physically fit men lived longer and attracted more wives?
I'm sure they tried to control for that and a host of other factors, but I'd really need to see the original paper to understand their work.
Unfortunately, in some places, the local clubs mostly book the sort of music the RIAA has been spoon-feeding us for years. It's a vicious cycle: people buy the labels' music, causing clubs to play it, causing people to think that's the best music out there, and buying more focus-grouped music.
According to a musician friend of mine, the DC area is particularly bad at that. If you want better music, move to Detroit. But then you have to live in Detroit.
Why are porno studios particularly interested in the feature?
Think of it this way: a lawnmower is mostly empty space. Care to stick your hand in one?
In the Bohr model you can think of it as the electrons zipping around and eventually coming within the zone populated by the electrons in membrane. Remember, the electron has an area of influence considerably bigger than the electron itself. And the entire outer surface of an atom/molecule is coated with electrons in a cloud much larger than the n, so the net effect is of a negative charge (unless some electrons are missing, in which case you get chemical reactions). Those negative charges repel.
What's actually going on is much weirder and more complex; the electron is kind of "smeared out" rather than zipping from place to place. But you get the gist.
That would be 10^-27 kg, a very small number, not 1027 kg.
Yes. You're hinting that you didn't take any quantum mechanics classes.
You get to charge a lot of money for your skills not because they took so long to develop, but because the years of development means that your skills are rare.
Musicians, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen. The world is full of skilled musicians. It's even full of skilled musicians who can put on a good show, though stagecraft is rarer than people think.
The real skill on that side is in getting people to all want one particular song. The record companies used to be pretty good at that, through a combination of skilled production, skilled marketing, and collusion with radio stations. Nobody listens to the radio any more, and skilled production comes free with an iMac.
Marketing is still a wide-open field. Maybe somebody will figure it out.
Good point about the places where interest-only loans can be valuable. I knew there must be a non-scam reason for them to exist. But I suspect more were written to speculators than to people with variable incomes.
The article says that he was doing 62 MPH according to the radar gun. The GPS says 45. If the GPS was right, why was the gun wrong? Bad calibration? Operator error? Dyslexia?
How many other people were caught "speeding" by the same gun,and are they planning to notify any of them that they have reason to believe the gun was wrong?
It is disappointing that the Washington Post would run something like this without running it past at least one person with an engineering degree.
You realize that it's the lycra they're advertising, not the chicks, right?
According to the Wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Benson), he's an writer and filmmaker. The closest thing he has to a qualification is a book of reprocessed images from space probes.
Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes.
Yes, I'm sure it's the same guy. Both the article and this wiki page cite the same book. Also, the Wiki page says he's "living in Slovenia", and the article includes a .si email address.
It is entirely reasonable to bring up ID in the same way as alchemy and Aristotelian physics. With a similar result, that science has refuted Aristotlean physics and that ID is not a scientific pursuit.
That result will make people scream, and tacking on "we don't know first causes, and with respect to them ID isn't actually wrong, merely scientifically useless" isn't going to mollify them.
If you thought they hated leaving out creationism, wait until you hear how they feel about having it actively refuted in class.
From TFA:
U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.
This was old yellowcake from the first Iraqi attempt at a nuke plant (which the Israelis bombed in 1981). Saddam couldn't use it because there were UN inspectors watching it.
So it was plausible that he might want some, but not true that he tried to get it from Niger. That was concocted evidence.
The description is crucial; the claims are just the specific of what they claim as novel. But the description has to tell how they do it, and in doing so usually does a much better job of telling you what it really is.