What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.
And MTG is there to help make it stick.
January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.
Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?
Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?
Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?
What are you waiting for?
I have a personal interest in this issue.
And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?
Fun Quote
(HT Aubergine)
This is amazing. This is glorious. Summon a surgeon – it’s been a little over a week and you’re supposed to call the doctor after just four hours.
From Kurt Schlichter, who can certainly write a good rant (https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2025/01/30/trumps-winning-streak-is-totally-discombobulating-the-democrats-n2651308)
Yep, Kurt has noticed that lots of people are getting twanging schadenböners.
And you do not have to be male to get this kind of böner.
Hat tip to Scott (I think–if it wasn’t Scott it was 4GodAndCountry) for this video, which implies a LOT of schadenböners in our future.
[WOLF EDIT – for whatever reason this YouTube video no longer embeds, even as the shortened URL (below), so I have converted both URLs to links which open up in a new tab.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFGOddatJVku0026amp
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot (i.e., paper) Prices
Last week:
Gold $3,038.80
Silver $29.56 (Yikes!!)
Platinum $931.00
Palladium $943.00
Rhodium $5,875.00
FRNSI* 146.002-
Gold:Silver 102.801- (Again, Yikes!!!)
This week, 3PM Mountain Time, Kitco “ask” prices. Markets have closed for the weekend.
Gold $3,238.00
Silver $32.33
Platinum $954.00
Palladium $942.00
Rhodium $5,850.00
FRNSI* 155.638+
Gold:Silver 100.155-
What a roller coaster ride these last couple of weeks have been!!
Note that gold was below 3,000 earlier this week because of the general market panic over the tariffs. Silver, alas, hasn’t been keeping up with gold. After a couple of days spent practically in lockstep with gold at about 100:0, silver is just being left behind. (Are Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in the room?) That was as of Thursday; on Friday silver played some catchup so over the week as a whole it gained against gold slightly. Or you can think of it as gold falling over two ounces of silver. Take your pick which one is the measuring stick.
Even platinum had some joy this last week, but that was after dropping below $900 for a bit.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
FKatzoid Out?
No, FKatzoid isn’t going glober, but apparently he took enough blowback for going after Lisbeth the way he did, that he’s rebranding himself. Note the following non-apology apology.
Potassium and Argon
Good old potassium. A very earthy element. In fact, by weight the Earth’s crust is 2.6 percent potassium. It’s common in minerals like feldspars, micas, clay minerals, tephra, and evaporites (e.g., dry lakebed salt). In other words, it’s common.
Common stuff! So why is it you never see it? It’s one of the “Alkali metals” like sodium (it’s sodium’s big brother), and thus it’s so reactive that pure potassium metal doesn’t last long. In fact, expose potassium metal to the air and it will form potassium peroxide in mere seconds on exposure to air. The layer formed will flake off, exposing more of the metal, and the process repeats itself.
If something can’t stand being in just ordinary air, you’re not going to see it lying around on the ground in lumps.
Being in that left-hand column of the table, potassium can’t resist just dropping an electron on the floor and becoming an ion. So it ends up having an important role in biochemistry as much metabolism is regulated by the concentration of potassium and sodium ions. It also shows up in various proteins and enzymes. It’s important stuff.
It’s rather famously found in bananas.
And it just happens to be just a teensy bit radioactive. Potassium, symbol K (you can thank the Germans for that), is element #19, and it has three isotopes found in nature. 39K is stable, and 93.3 percent of all potassium is this isotope. 41K is also stable, and it takes up 6.73 percent of potassium. (Those numbers appear to add up to over 100 (100.03) percent thanks to a round off error.) Well within that round-off error is the natural occurrence of the third naturally found isotope of potassium, 40K, which makes up 0.0120% of all potassium. In other words barely one atom in every ten thousand.
Potassium-40 (I’m going to go with K-40 or potassium-40–and similarly for other elements and other isotopes–from here on out, since superscripting is a slight pain in Wordpiss) has a half life of 1.248 x 109 years, which means it’s one of those “primordial” isotopes that has been with us all along. And it’s a bit odd, in one respect. Up to now, everything I’ve discussed has one method of decay; it spits out an alpha particle, or maybe a beta particle. But potassium-40 has three decay modes.
89.28 percent of the time, it decays by beta radiation, which means the nucleus gains a positive charge but stays at the same mass number. Gaining one charge makes it an atom of the 20th element, calcium (Ca), and in particular calcium-40.
The other two modes are similar to each other, or rather, they have similar results. 10.72 percent of the time the potassium-40 nucleus will “capture” an electron. The inner shell electrons spend some time actually within the nucleus and that can be enough in this case, for beta decay to run backwards, essentially. The K-40 nucleus loses a positive charge but retains the 40 mass number; that makes it element 18, argon (Ar), specifically argon-40. The third mode is the nucleus emitting a positron (also known as positive beta decay); this happens 0.001% of the time. But that too lowers the charge of the nucleus, and argon-40 is the result of this decay mode, too.
All uranium is radioactive. Same with thorium. Only a tiny fraction of potassium is radioactive. But potassium is so overwhelmingly common compared to the other two, that most of the radioactive activity in the Earth is due to potassium.
So show those bananas some respect.
Given how common potassium is in minerals, K-40 seems like a good candidate for radiometric dating. And it has two distinct daughter isotopes to choose from since it can decay into either argon-40 or calcium-40.
Calcium is even more abundant in the Earth’s crust than is potassium. Furthermore its most common isotope by far is calcium-40 (at 96.9 percent of the total). [Calcium has four other stable isotopes and another, a rare one, with a half life of 19 quintillion years, which is effectively stable.] Remember that K-40 is quite a small proportion of all potassium, and you can see that its decay into Ca-40 is just not going change the Ca-40 amounts by much…so it will be really hard to see the change in ratio.
Argon, on the other hand is a very different matter! It won’t combine with anything–it’s a noble gas–so it’s unlikely to get incorporated into any mineral except possibly by being physically trapped in the magma somehow–this is not quite impossible but very unlikely. It’s far more likely to escape the magma. Various environmental factors can change how well this works, so this effects the size of the error bars when doing dating. But for the most part, if we see any argon-40 in a rock, it’s almost certainly decay product, similar to the reasoning used for lead appearing in zircons.
So we have potassium-argon dating, also called K-Ar dating.
(So for Pat Fredericks, this is the sort of dating where you wait until her parents argon, before doing anything with his potassium-rich banana. If you don’t take care wait long enough, you might end up utilizing uranium-lead dating.)
This method can work with any rock sample over a few thousand years old. It won’t work well with samples younger than that.
First, you take your rock sample and heat it enough to release trapped gases. Use a mass spectrometer to measure the argon-40. Use flame photometry or atomic absorption spectroscopy to quantify the potassium. You just want to know how much potassium is in the mineral, you don’t need to be specific as to isotope.
Here’s the basic formula.
Note that the amount of argon in the sample is divided by 0.109, which is the factor used to adjust for the fact that not all K-40 decays into Ar-40. By doing this division you get a number indicating the total number of decay products of K-40 decay (not just the argon ones). In the formula above Kf is the amount of K-40 in the sample now. Often though they simply measure the total amount of potassium and multiply by the ratio of K-40 to K-39+K-41 (0.000117/0.932581).
As with any field and lab work there are complications that must be (and are) accounted for. See here for a deep dive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%E2%80%93Ar_dating
This is best used for dating minerals and rocks over 100,000 years old. Some of the rocks it is best used in are magnetic, so we can check the history of earth’s magnetic field by measuring the magnetism of the rocks and then determining their age.
We were even able to send a mini lab to Mars on the Curiosity rover, which was used to date a rock from Mars, ON Mars. This was very rough but the result was between 3.86 to 4.56 billion years old.
But there’s a bit more to this story.
Air is about 1 percent argon gas (0.934 percent to be precise). Almost all (99.6%) of the argon in the air is argon-40.
When we look at argon in space, though the vast majority of it is argon-36; the sun’s argon is 84.6 percent Ar-36 (based on sampling the solar wind), the outer gas giants are similarly rich in Ar-36–they’ll have retained what was in the original nebula. (This is logical because stars build up lighter elements by combining He-4 nuclei, and argon-36 is nine of those put together.) This suggests that Earth lost all of its original argon supply when it was very hot shortly after formation, and what argon we are breathing now is almost all radiogenic argon-40. Furthermore smaller worlds like Mercury, Mars and Titan all have some argon in their atmospheres, with argon-40 the vast majority of it. They too have radioactive decay going on.
If you think about it, it’s a bit freaky, you’re breathing stuff that used to be potassium with every breath. Fortunately it isn’t potassium any more because that would do a number on your lungs.
I haven’t found numbers on this, but this amount of argon in our air is yet another indication (as if not having short-half life primordial radioisotopes isn’t enough) that the Earth is old–as well as Mars, Titan and Mercury.
In fact this effect is so pronounced that if you measure the atomic weight of argon here on Earth, it’s higher than that of potassium, in spite of being before potassium on the periodic table. This was a bit confusing at first to people like Mendeleev when the periodic table was being developed.