Archive: August 21, 2003
Answers in Genesis: RATE group reveals exciting breakthroughs!
Basically, the RATE project (Radioactivity and the Age of The Earth) has completed some of its studies, and has come back with some interesting findings. Here's their paper (PDF), much of which is far beyond my comprehension, but the Answers in Genesis article summarizes it as follows:
* When uranium decays to lead, a by-product of this process is the formation of helium, a very light, inert gas which readily escapes from rock.
* Certain crystals called zircons, obtained from drilling into very deep granites, contain uranium which has partly decayed into lead.
* By measuring the amount of uranium and ‘radiogenic lead’ in these crystals, one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic ‘age’ assigned to the granites in which these zircons are found.)
* There is a significant amount of helium from that ‘1.5 billion years of decay’ still inside the zircons. This is at first glance surprising for long-agers, because of the ease with which one would expect helium (with its tiny, light, unreactive atoms) to escape from the spaces within the crystal structure. There should surely be hardly any left, because with such a slow buildup, it should be seeping out continually and not accumulating.
* Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project) to a world-class expert to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole earth) could not be older than between 4,000 and 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand years, 1.5 billion years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to give a date of 5680 (+/- 2000) years.
Interestingly, they also found that C-14 is present in diamonds, when given how old diamonds are supposed to be there shouldn't have been any C-14 left. No one's ever dated diamonds before? Could these be "recently formed" diamonds? How long are diamonds supposed to take to form in nature?
Oh, the diamonds they tested were pre-cambrian, therefore they couldn't have been recently formed according to evolutionary theory. I guess I didn't read carefully enough:
This latter suggestion about primordial C-14 appears to have been somewhat spectacularly supported when Dr Baumgardner sent a diamond for C-14 dating. It was the first time this had been attempted, and the answer came back positive—i.e. the diamond, formed deep inside the earth in a ‘Precambrian’ layer, nevertheless contained radioactive carbon, even though it ‘shouldn’t have’.
This is exceptionally striking evidence, because a diamond has remarkably powerful lattice bonds, so there is no way that subsequent biological contamination can be expected to find its way into the interior.
The diamond’s carbon-dated ‘age’ of <58,000 years is thus an upper limit for the age of the whole earth. And this age is brought down still further now that the helium diffusion results have so strongly affirmed dramatic past acceleration of radioactive decay.
CNN: Scientists: Ocean sponge bests man-made fiber optics
The glassy sponge, nicknamed the "Venus flower basket," grows the flexible fibers at cold temperatures using natural materials, a process materials scientists hope to duplicate in order to avoid the problems created by current fiber optic manufacturing methods that require high temperatures and produce relatively brittle cable.
The sponge also is able to add traces of sodium to the fibers which increase their ability to conduct light, something that cannot be done to glass fibers at the high temperatures needed for commercial manufacturing, Aizenberg said.
"We can draw it on paper and think about engineering it but we're in the stone age compared to nature," she said.
Biomimetics has driven a form of "bioprospecting" in the ocean, said Randy Kochevar, a marine biologist at the Monterey Aquarium in California.
"Folks involved in industry or medicine or biotechnology go out and look for compounds of interest in the deep sea, and it's so novel and so untapped there is a great deal of interest," Kochevar said.
Discoveries in recent years include an enzyme that improves laundry detergent, taken from bacteria that breaks down fats in cold water; a glowing protein from jellyfish that allows surgeons to illuminate cancerous tissue while they operate to remove it; and another enzyme that improves DNA testing, drawn from bacteria that live near hydrothermal vents at the ocean bottom.
My brother wanted a program to automatically index all of his winamp playlist files and play a random one. Easy enough, so I did it for him in a few lines of Python.
First, scanner.py searches through all of the specified directories looking for .m3u files, and runner.py picks a random one out of the generated list and plays it. It's extremely wasteful because it just sucks everything in memory whenever possible, but it's the simplest thing that could work, and it works well enough.
scanner.py:
import os
file_name = "m3u_ninja.txt"
directories = "directories.txt"
##########################################
def suck(starting_dir):
files = os.listdir(starting_dir)
m3us = []
for file in files:
file = starting_dir + "\\" + file
if file[-4:] == ".m3u":
m3us.append(file)
elif os.path.isdir(file):
m3us.extend(suck(file))
return m3us
##########################################
#get a list of input dirs
f = open(directories)
input_dirs = f.readlines()
f.close
#suck all dirs
list = []
for dir in input_dirs:
list.extend(suck(dir.strip()))
#print out m3us
f = open(file_name, "w")
for file in list:
f.write(file + "\n")
f.close()
runner.py
import random
import os
file_name = "m3u_ninja.txt"
f = open(file_name)
m3us = f.readlines()
f.close()
number_of_m3us = len(m3us)
random.seed()
index = random.randint(0,number_of_m3us-1)
command = "\""+m3us[index].strip()+"\""
os.system(command) #works because of default system assocation of .m3us
I figured this'll be here as a good reminder for me of Python's directory functions, as well as its random number stuff. Directories.txt just contains a directory on each line, without the trailing slash.
News.com: Rockin' on without Microsoft
But since jettisoning all of Microsoft products three years ago, Ernie Ball has also gained notoriety as a company that dumped most of its proprietary software--and still lived to tell the tale.
I became an open-source guy because we're a privately owned company, a family business that's been around for 30 years, making products and being a good member of society. We've never been sued, never had any problems paying our bills. And one day I got a call that there were armed marshals at my door talking about software license compliance...I thought I was OK; I buy computers with licensed software. But my lawyer told me it could be pretty bad.
We pass our old computers down. The guys in engineering need a new PC, so they get one and we pass theirs on to somebody doing clerical work. Well, if you don't wipe the hard drive on that PC, that's a violation. Even if they can tell a piece of software isn't being used, it's still a violation if it's on that hard drive. What I really thought is that you ought to treat people the way you want to be treated. I couldn't treat a customer the way Microsoft dealt with me...I went from being a pro-Microsoft guy to instantly being an anti-Microsoft guy.
But there's a real argument now about total cost of ownership, once you start adding up service, support, etc.
What support? I'm not making calls to Red Hat; I don't need to. I think that's propaganda...What about the cost of dealing with a virus? We don't have 'em. How about when we do have a problem, you don't have to send some guy to a corner of the building to find out what's going on--he never leaves his desk, because everything's server-based. There's no doubt that what I'm doing is cheaper to operate. The analyst guys can say whatever they want.
You see, I'm not in this just to get free software. No. 1, I don't think there's any such thing as free software. I think there's a cost in implementing all of it. How much of a cost depends on whom you talk to. Microsoft and some analysts will tell you about all the support calls and service problems. That's hysterical. Have they worked in my office? I can find out how many calls my guys have made to Red Hat, but I'm pretty sure the answer is none or close to it...It just doesn't crash as much as Windows. And I don't have to buy new computers every time they come out with a new release and abandon the old one.
If [Microsoft] cared about me, they wouldn't have approached me the way they did in the first place...And I'm glad they didn't try to get me back. I thank them for opening my eyes, because I'm definitely money ahead now and I'm definitely just as productive, and I don't have any problems communicating with my customers. So thank you, Microsoft
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Thursday, August 21, 2003
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new⇒Johnny Walker Blue Label
Wow, thanks for the scotch review:D
Lagavulin and Laphroaig aresome of...
Keith: Aug 29, 3:35pm