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.

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[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;pp=ygUfc293IHRoZSB3aW5kIHJlYXAgdGhlIHdoaXJsd2luZA%3D%3D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFGOddatJVku0026amp

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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 K_f 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.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

January 6 Tapes?

Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

Evading Reality

Many things the Left believes are simply not true. Right now the focus is on the size and scope of our government, and the many many billions of dollars the government has been spending on no-one-knew-what. None of that money is going to a key role of government. Which, after all, has the sole purpose of protecting rights.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss this as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.

As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.

And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.

So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things, well here we go for another week of WINNING against the Deep State.

I confess that the novelty has not worn off.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Yes, we won this time around. Not only did we win, we got to KEEP that win instead of having it stolen from us.

But no one should imagine that that’s the end of electoral fraud. Much work needs to be done to ensure it doesn’t just happen again next time around. And incidentally to rescue those states currently in the grips of self-perpetuating fraud, where the people who stole the last election, make sure it’s easier to steal the next one.

This issue, though it’s not front-and-center right now, is not going away, and if we ignore it, we’ll pay the price. See the article above about the consequences of evading reality.

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 Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $2,985.50
Silver $33.87
Platinum $1004.00
Palladium $988.00
Rhodium $5,700.00
FRNSI* 143.424-
Gold:Silver 88.146-

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $3,024.40
Silver $33.10
Platinum $988.00
Palladium $984.00
Rhodium $6,100.00
FRNSI* 145.305+
Gold:Silver 91.372-

Gold was actually up in the 3040s Wednesday and Thursday but dropped on Friday, (which has been a common pattern for years). Platinum went nowhere. Silver is actually down. My understanding is that gold’s rise has been driven by central bank purchases. Since they don’t bother with silver, that explains why silver is basically tango uniform. The gold:silver ratio has been above 100 before, and I would be surprised if it doesn’t get there again soon.

*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.

The Math Behind Radiometric Dating

This is going to be a bit brutal for those who are math phobic. For the rest it will reward careful attention.

Radiometric dating involves, at the very least, measuring the quantities of parent isotopes and daughter isotopes. In some situations it gets more complicated than that, and to be honest those situations are actually the usual ones.

Introducing Uranium-Lead Dating

So let’s take an actual case as an example, a method called uranium-lead dating, because the parent isotope is uranium, and the daughter isotope is lead. Actually there are two sets of parent-daughter isotopes in this case: uranium-238 with daughter isotope lead-206, and uranium-235 to lead-207. (Check: The differences between the mass numbers must be a multiple of 4, because a change of 4 is the effect alpha decay will have. And yes it looks like I got the right numbers. I saw a video recently that swapped the lead isotope numbers; an easy mistake to make.) This makes it a favorite because you can do two datings with one sample.

For simplicity we will start by considering only the uranium-238 to lead-206 pairing. Most dating methods use an isotope that decays directly into the daughter product. U-238 does not do this. It decays into thorium-234 by alpha decay, then there are a chain of thirteen more decays (there are alternate paths, but all are thirteen steps long, not including that first alpha decay) for total of fourteen steps before it gets to lead-206.

[Check this one too. The difference in mass numbers is 238-206=32; dividing by four that is eight alpha decays. But eight alpha decays reduces the number of protons by sixteen, so if that’s all that happened uranium-238 would become osmium-206. (Uranium is element 92; 92-16=76; 76 is osmium.) In order to actually end up with lead (82), we need to, somewhere along the way, get six additional protons; we do that with negative beta decay (β^–) which turns a neutron into a proton. So six beta decays are needed. Eight alpha decays + six negative beta decays = 14 total decays.]

Is this huge number of decays a problem? In principle it could be, but in this case it’s not. The initial uranium-238 to thorium-234 decay is very slow, with a half life of 4,468,000,000 years. Compared to this the others are practically instantaneous, with uranium-234 to thorium-230 requiring 245,000 years and thorium-230 to radium-226 requiring 75,400 years. Radium-226 to radon-222 has a half life of 1600 years. All of the other decays happen in less than a year and some take less than a second. So, basically, once a uranium-238 atom cuts loose and spits out an alpha particle, it’s going to be a lead-206 atom in less than a couple of million years, tops; which in comparison to the half life of uranium-238 (4,468 million years) is negligible.

Half Lives and the Radioactive Decay Equation

So, let me remind you about half lives. This is the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms in the sample to decay. It’s a little tricky wrapping one’s head around this at first. Surely, if half of the atoms are gone in 4,468 million years, the other half ought to be gone in another 4,468 million years. But it doesn’t work that way.

Each atom is independent of the others, and any given U-238 atom has a totally random 50 percent chance of going “kablooey” sometime within the next 4,468 million years. It could be right now while you’re watching it, or it could be 4,467.999 million years from now. If it doesn’t happen between now and then, guess what? You are still looking at an atom that has a 50 percent chance of going “kablooey” in the next 4,468 million years. The past history doesn’t matter. If the atom is 100,000 million years old already, versus created last year, it still has the same changes of blowing up in the same period of time.

Go to multiple atoms in a sample; billions, trillions or quadrillions of them [a one-gram sample of uranium-238 has 2.53 sextillion (or 2.53 trillion billion) atoms in it]. Since each individual atom has a 50 percent chance of blowing up in the next 4,468 million years, half of them, you don’t know which ones in advance, but half of them will do so. OK, so let’s say your very distant descendant takes your one gram sample and separates out all of the lead and intermediate decay products (the other things on the chain), and he has half a gram of uranium-238. His past does not matter; he has a half-gram sample of uranium-238 and half of it will decay in the next 4,468 million years, leaving his distant descendant with a quarter of a gram of uranium. (And maybe by that time an honest Leftist will have been born.)

The following GIF is a simulation of radioactive decay, with four samples each of four and four hundred atoms. The number at the top is the number of elapsed half lives. (It runs a bit fast unfortunately, so watch closely.)

Another way to talk about it is to say that, for a given isotope, the number of decaying atoms in some time interval is proportional to the current number of atoms.

In fact since the decaying atoms reduce the size of the sample, the number of decays is the rate of change of the size of the sample. Twice as many decays? Twice as fast a reduction.

In order to truly understand radiometric dating we have to understand this, and be able to express it mathematically. And I want you to truly understand it.

Intense Math Alert! Go to the bolded paragraph below to skip this.

Expressing this semi-mathematically, using ∝ for “is proportional to”:

(Number of decays in a specified time interval) ∝ (Current size of sample)

Or:

(rate of change of the sample size) ∝ (Current size of sample)

Or a bit more formally, with N(t) being the number of atoms in the sample at time t, expressed in calculus notation:

−dN/dt ∝ N

(The negative sign is because the change is in the downward direction, yet we will want to use a positive constant when we introduce it shortly.)

Or we can make it an equation by creating a proportionality constant, λ, (Greek lower-case lambda); in this case it’s called the decay constant.

−dN/dt = λN

And rearrange just a bit:

dN/N = −λdt

Welcome to the world of differential equations. This one is easy to solve, since the only way a function can be its own derivative is if the function is e^t, and if you want a function to be its own derivative but multiplied by some number is for the function to be something like e^kt., in which case the derivative will be ke^t. So taking advantage of this fact, we get:

Key Equation: N(t) = N₀e^−λt

Where N₀ is the size of the sample at some particular time, and N(t) is the size of the sample at some earlier or later time, t.

[e is the base of the natural logarithms and I talk about it (and logarithms) here: https://www.theqtree.com/2023/05/20/2023%C2%B705%C2%B720-joe-biden-didnt-win-daily-thread/ and here: https://www.theqtree.com/2023/06/17/2023%c2%b706%c2%b717-joe-biden-didnt-win-daily-thread/.]

This concerns the so-called parent nuclide. The daughter product increases, of course. What’s the formula for that? It’s convenient that the number of atoms does not change; even if fewer and fewer of them are the parent isotope. In other words, the total number of atoms, parent + daughter, is always N₀ no matter how much (or how little) decay has happened. That means that to get the number of daughter atoms, you can simply subtract the number of parent atoms from the original number of parent atoms. I’m using subscripts p and d here to indicate number of parent and daughter atoms

N_d(t) = N₀ − N_p(t)

Substituting in the Key Equation for N_p:

N_d(t) = N₀ − N₀e^−λt

But this just begs to be simplified a bit:

N_d(t) = N₀(1 − e^−λt)

Earlier I was talking in terms of half lives, but we don’t see that here; we see this funky lambda constant instead. Can we get to a formula that uses half lives?

Yes but before we proceed I should say something about λ. We’re eventually going to want to put an actual numerical value on it, but it’s important to note that this is a number that applies to some given time interval. A second, a year, a million years. This number is actually the fraction of the sample that decays in whatever time interval you choose. So if a trillionth of the sample decays in one second, λ is one trillionth (0.000000000001), but to express that in years, you need to multiply it by 60 × 60 × 24 × 365.25, and if you want it to express it for millions of years, you have to multiply it again by another million. In this case we’re dealing with geology and our λ values will be set for million-year units.

The first step is to simply invert λ, defining a new constant τ:

τ = 1/λ

This gives you the average lifetime for an atom of the parent isotope, in whatever unit (seconds, years, millions of years, whatever) that you used for λ.

Note that this is not the same as half life. Half life is the time it takes for half of the atoms to go kablooey, but that’s not the average time it will take for one to do so. Some atoms ( one in 1024) will survive ten half lives, and they pull the average up. But it’s easy to get to the half life, t_1/2 from here–multiply by the natural log of 2 (about 0.693):

t_1/2 = τ ln(2) = ln(2) / λ

The reverse process:

λ = ln(2) / t_1/2

And it turns out that there’s a version of the Key Equation with the half life…actually two versions that are equivalent to each other.

Cumbersome Half Life Key Equation: N(t) = N₀e^{−ln(2)t/t_1/2}

This is ugly so it gets simplified as follows:

Simple Half Life Key Equation: N(t) = N₀ 2^-(t/t_1/2)

This one is intuitive in terms of half lives. Raise 1/2 to the power of the number of half lives that have elapsed to get the fraction of atoms remaining, then multiply by the original number. Or equivalently raise 2 to the negative power of the number of half lives.

So do we prefer working with λ or with t_1/2? Scientific calculators come with an e^x key; they never come with a 2x key–which forces us to work with that cumbersome formula above if we want to use half lives. (Honestly I’d write a program if it were a programmable calculator: store the half life in memory, and input the time, let the program do all the steps in the Cumbersome equation.) On the other hand I am having a very difficult time finding a table of isotope decay rates; half lives are easy to find.

END OF INTENSE MATH but be aware there will be a lot of applying the equations from here on out. That’s basically arithmetic, though, not differential equations.

For those of you rejoining us here, I’m going to repeat the formulas and definitions:

Decay Rate Key Equation: N(t) = N₀e^−λt

Cumbersome Half Life Key Equation: N(t) = N₀e^{−ln(2)t/t_1/2}

Simple Half Life Key Equation: N(t) = N₀ 2^-(t/t_1/2)

N(t) is the number of atoms of the parent isotope (the one that’s decaying away) at any given time t. N₀ is the original number of atoms of the parent isotope.

t_1/2 is the half life. λ is the decay constant, the fraction of the sample that decays in some specified time (seconds, or millions of years, as appropriate). Dividing 1 by λ gives τ, the average lifetime of an atom in the sample.

I rarely see λ used. But for uranium-238 it’s: 4.916 x 10^-18 (when working in seconds) and 1.551 x 10^-10 (when working in years). If you use the latter number you need to supply t in years, not seconds–which, let’s face it, is more likely what you want to do anyway. In fact, this is geology (or have you forgotten?): You probably want millions of years, in which case λ for uranium-238 is 1.551 x 10^-4.

In fact, let me supply the numbers for U-235, U-238, and thorium-232, since we’re going to be mentioning them at some point below.

(I here took the liberty of using “engineering” numbers rather than strict scientific notation (where the power is set so only one number is left of the decimal point) so that you could compare the decay rates more readily. The engineering mode uses powers that are multiples of three so it’s easy to write out a metric prefix, e.g, 1.32 × 10⁴ watts (scientific notation) becomes 13.2 × 10³ watts (engineering notation) or 13.2 kW (very readily read off the engineering notation).)

OK, there is some more math but at least I’m not slinging differential equations any more:

Determining Age (The Simple, Ideal Case)

Since we are dating a sample rather than predicting how much will be left after some time, these formulas are backwards. Instead of telling us how much is left after a known time has elapsed, we expect to know how much is left, and want to know how much time it took to get to that point.

Rearranging the Decay Rate Key Equation we get:

t = ln(N/N₀) / –λ

or, getting rid of the minus sign by taking the natural log of the reciprocal instead:

The Dating Equation: t = ln(N₀/N)/λ.

(“ln” is the natural log; the logarithm to the base e.)

OK so how do we apply this?

In principle, we can analyze some rock to determine how much U-235, Pb-207, U-238, Pb-206, and for bonus, Th-232 and Pb-208 is in it. We will want to know numbers of atoms–or at least the ratio of the number of atoms, not weight, but it’s easy enough to convert. We can then use the last formula above three times, remembering that (for the U-235 case) N₀ is actually the sum of the U-235+Pb-207 numbers, whereas N is just the U-235 count. So you have two (or three, if you are checking thorium as well) pairs of numbers; run the calculation with each one. You now have three answers; if they are all the same, you’re in business.

Here’s an example: A rock that happens to be 704 million years old. You don’t know this (real science doesn’t have the answers in the back of the book), but you want to, so you take a tiny sample. For now we’ll assume no pre-existing daughter nuclides, no losses of any atoms over time from the sample, and no contamination of the sample. You put that sample into a mass spectrometer, which vaporizes the sample, ionizes the atoms, and sends them past a magnet at high speed. The atoms, being charged, will follow curved paths past the magnet. Heavier atoms will be bent less by the magnet. We put a detector downstream and it notes how many atoms hit where an atom of mass 206 should strike. Also for 207, 208, 232, 235, and 238.

What does our scientist see? It so happens I picked that number for a reason; it’s the half life of U-235. So our scientist will see equal numbers of U-235 and Pb-207, say 5 million of each. It doesn’t matter, it’s the ratio between the two that matters, and in this case it’s 1:1. That will probably make him smile because he won’t even have to pull out his calculator for that one–he will already know the answer. But he decides to check that, so what about U-238 and Pb-206? He will see 11.54 atoms of Pb-206 for every hundred atoms of U-238. Say, 1 billlion atoms of U-238 and 115.4 million atoms of Pb-206 But in order to use the formula above, he needs N₀/N, the ratio of the remaining parent atoms (1 billion) divided by the total number of atoms involved in this (parent + daughter), to the number of remaining atoms. So what he wants is (1 billion + 115.4 million)/1 billion = 1,115,400,000/1,000,000,000 = 1.0577. When he plugs that into the dating equation t = ln(N₀/N)/λ, being careful to use the value of λ for U-238, he gets 703.98 million years. Now he’s really happy because his numbers match. If he checks Th-232/Pb-208 he’ll get (regardless of the actual amounts) 3.534 atoms of lead-208 for every hundred atoms of thorium-232. Using this, he gets N₀/N of 1.0353, divides by λ for Th-232 (49.33 × 10⁻⁶), hits the e^x key on his calculator…and the age comes out as 704.1 million years. Now he’s grinning ear to ear, because he took three sets of measurements, independent of each other, and got the same result every time. What could be easier? (Actually a lot of things could be easier; actually analyzing the sample in order to get those six numbers is painstaking work.)

That’s the third grade version of what is called “uranium-lead dating.”

[In the light of a joke Pat Frederick made last time, uranium-lead radiometric dating is when her father shoots you full of lead or depleted uranium because he caught you shooting his daughter full of something else. But that’s the high-school level version.]

How To Deal With Non-Ideal Cases

I said this was the third grade version. That’s because I made a bunch of assumptions for this case. I said so before, and now I am going to repeat them.

1. No initial daughter nuclides (in other words the rock contained no lead when it was formed).
2. Neither a) any lead nor b) any uranium (or thorium) leached out of the rock since it was formed, since that will mess up our ratios when we measure them.
3. No contamination of the sample either from natural processes or as it is collected and analyzed.

The problem is when dealing with rocks it’s never that tidy, though it can get close. We cannot simply assume that the sample started out with no daughter isotope in it. Or make any of those other assumptions, at least not without justification.

So when uranium-lead dating is done (in the lab, not in her house), it’s usually done with the mineral zircon. The chemical formula for this is ZrSiO₄. It’s a silicate of zirconium, element #40. Here is an insanely nice specimen of zircon:

But hold on here. There’s no uranium in this mineral!

There’s no uranium, if it’s pure. However these crystals form in a mass of molten rock (magma), and this is Planet Earth unfiltered and unpurified. There will, therefore, almost always be impurities in it. (This is why pure white diamonds are very valuable; they have little to no impurities in them and that is a rare situation indeed.)

Zircon crystals will form in any igneous rock as it solidifies from magma. In fact, they’re practically the first thing that will form. (This is good because it’s easier for a crystal in still-liquid medium to reject impurities than it is, if almost everything surrounding it is already solidified.) They typically end up being the size of sand grains, and so any sizeable igneous rock will have a number of them in it. Zircons are also harder than quartz, with a Mohs hardness of 7.5 vs. quartz’s 7.0. (They will scratch steel and glass.) Which means they will be hard to damage, and can erode out of an igneous rock and end up incorporated in a sedimentary rock, essentially undamaged.

As it happens, if there is any uranium (either isotope, it doesn’t matter because we’re doing chemistry at the moment) in the magma, it can be incorporated in the zircon quite readily. So can thorium. The uranium atoms end up as part of the crystal, replacing some of the zirconium. But the cool thing about it, and the reason we want zircon crystals, is that lead is rejected as the crystal forms. So the innards of the new crystal will contain some uranium, and no lead whatsoever.

Furthermore, uranium won’t leach out of the zircon crystals over time.

That’s handy! And sedimentary rocks will have the crystals too, once they erode from igneous rocks. The thing to remember about the crystals in sedimentary rock is that dating those crystals will not give you the age of the sedimentary rock, but rather the age of some igneous rock that eroded, the grains from which became part of the sedimentary rock. They will put a maximum on the age of the sedimentary rock, but no minimum (maybe it formed last Tuesday).

This is a bit of a pain, because we find fossils, including index fossils, almost entirely in sedimentary rock. It’s not insurmountable, but that’s a topic for a future post. For now let’s stick to igneous rock.

If we take care to use the innards of the zircon crystal, rather than the surface, and run our lab like a clean room, we can reduce the possibility of contamination. If there is contamination in spite of all of these, we won’t get consistent answers (as we did in our example above) and can just disregard the results from that sample.

We’ve taken care of every assumption, except for 2a: We don’t know whether or not any lead leached out of the crystal after it was formed. And that does happen. Zircon crystals don’t like lead, so they’ll push it out if they have a chance, while hanging on to the uranium and thorium that’s still left.

One thing that can cause this is if the zircon is heated to over 900 C after it is formed, like happens when the rock it is part of is transformed into a metamorphic rock. Also, ironically, the uranium’s radiation can actually damage the crystal as it decays, allowing lead to leak out at lower temperatures. (And remember, every uranium-238 atom that decays emits radiation fourteen times!)

OK so how do we deal with this?

Let’s go back to our example of the 704 million year old unicorn rock that had no issues with it. Make it a rock with some number of zircon crystals, and we’ll use the crystals.

The crystals will all have different rates of lead loss, slightly different but different enough for this to work. So let’s take a specific crystal, and let’s say it has lost fifty percent of its lead.

How does a scientist use this to date the rock?

Let’s first see what he measures.

In our previous example, the scientist saw 5 million atoms each of U-235 and Pb-207. This time, though, unbeknownst to the scientist, half of the lead leaked out before the sample was collected. So what he sees instead is 5 million atoms of U-235 and 2.5 million atoms of Pb-207. It looks like N₀ is 7.5 million (not 10 million) so he does the division N₀/N and comes up with 3/2 (instead of 2).

He plugs that into the Dating Equation:

t = ln(N₀/N)/λ

using λ for U-235 and gets: 411.8 million years (probably rounding it to 412).

We happen to know this is wrong. He doesn’t.

Not yet, anyway.

Next, he works U-238 and Pb-206. This time he sees a billion atoms of U-238, but instead of 115.4 million atoms of Pb-206, he only sees 57.7 million. So he is dividing 1,057,700,000 by 1,000,000,000, and getting 1.0577. Plugging that into the Dating Equation with the decay constant for U-238, he gets 361.597…okay, 362 million years. Doing the same exercise with thorium (I’ll save you the gory details) yields an age of 355.1 million years, or 355 million.

These numbers are all over the freaking map. None of them are even remotely right…and this guy has been doing this sort of work for more than two weeks so he knows that this variation actually means he’s nowhere close, and he’s dealing with crystals that lost some of their lead.

What to do now?

Concordia Diagrams to the Rescue

Analyze another zircon crystal, and another. Let’s say the next one has only 40 percent loss of the lead. In that case the U-235 date is 477 million years, the U-238 date is 432 million years, and the thorium date is 425 million years.

He accumulates at least a few of these sets of data.

OK now the mathematical tool comes in. Bring out a sheet of graph paper and label the horizontal Pb-207/U-235 and the vertical Pb-206/U-238.

Before doing anything with the data collected, we have a bit of prep to do. We have to draw a line that shows the values where the two dates are in “concord” (agreement) with each other, and this will be called a “concordia diagram”

For instance, for an age of 100 million years, a perfect rock (like in my first example) will show 90.6 percent U-235 and 9.377 percent Pb-207. Dividing the two we get a ratio 0.1035. The same ideal rock would be 98.5 percent U-238 and 1.54 percent Pb-206. (We’re going to ignore the thorium for now), the ratio is 0.0156. So put a mark at 0.1035 on the horizontal and 0.0156 on the vertical. Label that mark “100.”

Do this for a bunch of different ages and you get this sort of curved line, with different points on the line labeled with different ages. It goes up to the right, but instead of being a straight line it bulges slightly upward.

Note this is a bit different from the graphs we made in Algebra 1. There, we had the independent variable along the horizontal axis, and the dependent variable on the vertical axis. This time we have two dependent variables, those two ratios, off of one independent variable (the age that would give those ratios under ideal circumstances). We are plotting the two dependent variables against each other.

(You don’t have to do all of this math every time, because the points are always the same. I would bet that it’s in tables. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was graph paper with this line pre-printed on it, though in the modern digital age that may have fallen by the wayside.)

In fact, I just used a spreadsheet to compute the values for 100, 200, 300…and so on up to 1000 million years, and plotted them. (I wasn’t able to get the spreadsheet to label the points.) In this case, 100 million years is at the lower left, and 1 billion years is at the upper right.

OK, now that you have this blank template, plot all of your measurements on it. For the first sample, there were 2.5 million atoms of Pb-207 and 5 million of U-235, so the ratio is 0.5. That’s your “x” value. And there were 57.7 million Pb-206 atoms versus 1 billion U-238 atoms, so the ratio is 0.0577. That’s your y value. Plot a point at (0.5, 0.0577)

Repeat for the other samples. These data points should lie along a straight line (if it’s not exact there are mathematical methods to find the “best fit” line). Extend it, and it will cross the curved line in two places. The upper right intersection represents the original ratios, you then can backtrack to figure out what age that point on the curved line represents. And you will get 704 million years, which is the actual age of the rock you pulled the zircon crystals from.

I can’t seem to get sample points onto the graph I just uploaded, but what I can do is show you an actual concordia diagram. This one was used to date rocks from the Klamath Mountains in Northern California. In this case as you can see the age is 461.17 +/- 31 Ma. (Spoiler: This turns out to be the middle of the Ordovician period. My example 704 million year old rock would, if real, come from the Cryogenian period.)

The upshot of this is, the concordia diagram lets you use the fact that there are two measurements to account for loss of daughter isotope, provided you can take multiple samples (with different amounts of loss) from the same rock.

What about the thorium-to-lead part? One could use Pb-208/Th-232 in a concordia diagram, instead of one of the two lead/uranium isotopes, but thorium decays more slowly so its ratios are smaller and a tiny variation in the measurement leads to a bigger variation in the date. The two uranium-lead numbers are more sensitive, so they get used instead.

There is a closely related method called Lead-Lead dating. I’ll cover that next time. Meanwhile, you’re probably wondering. What’s the oldest rock we’ve found?

Quit Holding Out On Us

The oldest “hit” found using zircons and uranium-lead dating so far is some zircon crystals taken from a rock in the Jack Hills in Western Australia, north of Perth. The crystals were found in a sedimentary rock, so the rock as a whole is younger than the zircons, which came out of an igneous rock that eroded a long time ago.

And that number came out to be: 4,404 +/- 8 million years.

Remember that this is a minimum age for the Earth. We’ll improve on it.

Here’s a picture of a Jack Hills rock:

It is believed that this rock (as a combined entity) is about 3 billion years old (that’s not a very precise number, but that’s the point; it’s hard to date sedimentary rocks), but obviously it’s made of older stuff, including those ancient zircon crystals.

I want to close by emphasizing that uranium-lead dating has been used countless times, and between that and other methods of dating I’ll be covering soon–also used countless times–we have built up a consistent notion of Earth’s age and ages for events during Earth’s “lifetime.” This isn’t a one-off that was then uncritically accepted.

Other, slightly newer zircons (4.3 billion years old) from the same area have had their oxygen atoms examined and the isotopic mix there (O-16 vs. O-17 vs. O-18, all stable) implies there was already liquid water on Earth’s surface.

And accepting these numbers isn’t a “presupposition” (as some people would claim) because the numbers are the results of a lot of evidence and scientific investigation.

If you want to dispute numbers in the millions and billions of years, you are going up against, quite literally, tons of hard evidence.

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.

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 $2,858.10
Silver $31.20
Platinum $953.00
Palladium $945.00
Rhodium $5,100.00
FRNSI* 137.261-
Gold:Silver 91.606-

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, Kitco “ask” prices. Markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $2,911.50
Silver $32.60
Platinum $974.00
Palladium $934.00
Rhodium $6,000.00
FRNSI* 139.844-
Gold:Silver 89.310-

Palladium is below platinum again…but look at rhodium, which has gone up nine hundred bucks!

The people who bloviate on this sort of thing for a living (if this is all I did I’d starve to death) claim the precious metals are “consolidating” with gold in the 2910-2920 range while the stock indices go down. At least silver is up relative to gold!

*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.

Latest Flerfer Goofiness

OK unlike last week I’m going to try to supply some actual content. (Last week was nonstop busy.)

Our friend Fkatzoid is back. Watch him duck and weave when he’s asked where the south pole is (at 16:45).

Will Duffy is trying to make the point that whether you head south from Africa, South America, or New Zealand, you end up at the same place when you get to the south pole. According to the Gleasons’s Map, however, the South Pole isn’t a point, it’s a circle approximately 60,000 miles in circumference, so that shouldn’t happen. Either Fkatzoid is an even bigger idiot than he showed himself to be last time, or he’s trying very hard to evade having this pointed out to his audience.

Later on at about 2:31:45…apparently Lisbeth (who went to Antarctica) is on the verge of joining Mark Sargent’s channel; MC Toon begs her not to ruin her life doing so.

Just a few minutes later, you see someone named JK trying to find a video proving that people who try to go to Antarctica will be intercepted by any of a number of different navies and turned back as soon as they sail across 60 S latitude. He claims there are many of these videos; he eventually finds the one Will Duffy expected–taken in the Bass Strait between Tasmania and mainland Australia, nowhere near Antarctica. Listen to McToon’s rant at 2:45:22.

Here’s another debate with Duffy destroying someone I’ve never heard of named Nathan Thompson. (Not to be confused with Nathan “where are the guns” Oakley.)

Two Birds…One Stone

OK this one is going to seem like geology…then physics…then back to geology. It’s a good illustration of how all of human knowledge about the natural world is interconnected. Sometimes great progress is made when people in two different fields get together; sometimes a new discipline even is formed–recent work has done much to highlight the effects of living organisms on the geology of the Earth…yes, our rocks would be different if there were no life on earth (and there’d be no geologists to notice, of course).

An Extremely Inadequate Intro to Mineralogy

Let’s take a very brief and incomplete (and likely incompetent, as I am out over my skis here) look at mineralogy.

I’ve talked about rocks a lot but not so much about what they’re made of. If you look closely–perhaps it will take a microscope–at an igneous rock (one that cooled from the molten state) you’ll see it’s made up of a bunch of different kinds of crystals. Crystals form when a chemical compound comes out of solution and the individual molecules line up in a regular array.

Some rocks are just one big crystal. Others are multiple crystals of the same thing.

The compounds that make the crystals are minerals (and one of their characteristics is how the crystals are shaped).

What are those compounds? Let’s set the stage a bit. If you take the outer layer of the Earth, the Earth’s crust, and analyze a completely average piece of it…it’s 46.1 percent oxygen by weight. Oxygen! There is much, much, much more oxygen beneath your feet than above your head in the air. Oxygen is also the third most abundant element in the universe as a whole–after hydrogen and helium.

Coming in second at 28.2 percent is silicon. Then aluminum at 8.23%, iron at 5.63%, calcium at 4.15%, sodium at 2.36%, magnesium at 2.33% potassium at 2.09%, titanium at 0.565%…and everything else is at 1/7th of a percent or less. At the bottom end you have rhenium at 7/10ths of one part per billion. (However two gases, krypton and xenon, also show up at even lower percentages, and a bunch of transient radioactive elements are lower still than that.)

The ones at the top of the list don’t ever show up in pure elemental or “native” form; they’re pretty reactive. Minerals will be largely (but very luckily for us, not completely) formed of these elements.

The elements in general are divided into groups according to the “Goldschmidt Classification.” The groups are “lithophile” (rock loving), “Siderophile” (iron loving), “chalcophile” (bronze loving), and “atmophile” (atmosphere loving). The group an element is in is a huge determiner of its fate. Lithophile and chalcophile elements both appear predominantly near the Earth’s surface, in the crust; with the chalcophile elements often combining with sulfur. Siderophile elements largely sank, with almost all of the iron, towards the Earth’s core.

(There is a very slick wikipedia graphic for this, a periodic table colored by Goldschmidt classification…but it’s actually a table rather than an image and I was unsuccessful in getting it copied over here. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldschmidt_classification )

There are officially 6,118 mineral species known to man today. Minerals must be naturally occurring and forming by natural or geological processes, must be a solid substance (with the exception of native mercury). Water and carbon dioxide are not minerals even when they show up embedded in rocks, but water ice in glaciers is a mineral. A mineral must have a well defined crystal structure. (This ends up excluding things like obsidian which don’t have a crystal structure.) And the chemical composition must be well defined. However, that could include mixtures of similar compounds; sometimes one element will substitute for another of similar size and chemistry to one extent or another.

There are a number of different ways minerals can be classified, based on hardness, color, crystalline structure, cleavage (i.e. which planes it will split on most cleanly), specific gravity (galena, a lead ore, is very dense, for instance–over seven times that of water whereas the typical rock is in the 2.5-3.5 range)…and by chemistry. But this is far from straightforward, since nothing is pure. For instance a mineral whose structure is largely silicon will often have an aluminum atom substituted for the silicon; sometimes this is a regular substitution, making a distinct chemical series.

Minerals fall into a number of different groups; the most common by far is silicates; these are minerals formed by different arrangements of the [SiO₄]^4- tetrahedron, one silicon atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms.

This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, after all oxygen and silicon make up most of rocks. There are a simply staggering number of ways to combine these tetrahedra at the corners (where an oxygen atom will end being shared by two tetrahedra); chains, rings, lattices…just for instance:

The most basic of these is quartz, consisting of nothing but silicon and oxygen. Since each oxygen atom is shared by two silicon atoms, the formula ends up being SiO₂.

Quartz, when absolutely pure, is clear as glass. Different impurities will give it colors, smoky quartz and amethyst being examples, but there are many more.

And in some cases other elements are interspersed with the tetrahedra, or sometimes the silicon is partially replaced by other elements. This can alter the structure as well as the composition.

The most common of the silicates are a grouping called the feldspars, where Al3+ substitutes for the Si4+, but this creates a charge imbalance that requires other elements added in as cations. You end up with [AlSi₃O₈]^– or [Al₂Si₂O₈]^2-. In other cases silicates can form in sheets, like mica.

If you haven’t realized this by now, it turns out that silicates are bewilderingly complex. For a deep dive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicate_mineral.

In other groups we have native elements. For example gold, silver, and copper appear in native form as nuggets. There are also platinum nuggets. But also there are diamonds and graphite, both forms of native carbon. Sulfur also appears near volcanic vents. And in many cases the nuggets aren’t pure but are alloys, but still a lump of metal, rather than a “rock.”

Next we have sulfides, compounds of metals and sulfur, famously iron pyrite (fools gold), red cinnabar (a mercury ore). Sometimes tellurium, arsenic, or selenium will substitute for some or even all of the sulfur.

Oxides are metals combined with oxygen, such as hematite (iron), bauxites (aluminum), magnetite (iron again).

Halides are those where a halogen (fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine) is the main anion; table salt is the most common example, with chlorine combined with sodium.

Carbonate minerals have a carbonate [CO₃]^2- group in them. They will react with acids; so field geologists will often have a small vial of acid to test for them. The most common is calcium carbonate…also known as calcite, the main component of limestone. This is weakly soluble in water, leading to the formation of cave systems.

There are sulfates (distinct from sulfides mentioned above) with the sulfate anion, [SO₄]^2-, combined with something else.

The last common group is the phosphates, with a [PO₄]^3- unit, combined with something else. These minerals are what our bones and teeth are made out of.

It’s a gigantic mess, honestly; and it gets more and more complicated when it turns out that a mineral can be a mixture of, say, two different sulfates mixed together; the formula ends up including a bracket with two or three different atoms specified because they are intermixed in some proportion.

I have not even scratched the surface of this topic (and those familiar with hardness testing will see the pun). I may not have said anything wrong in this section, but even if we’re that fortunate, I’m sure a real mineralogist would find much to complain about, important things left out, inconsistent “depth” of the dives I took, and so on. I know I said next to nothing about crystal structure and I may try to rectify that some day.

Back to the Historical Narrative

OK so back to the story: By the mid 1800s geology had made huge strides to systematize the variety of rocks and landscapes we see here on Earth. Geologists had even developed the ability to describe what had happened in the past in some arbitrarily picked location. Glaciers, lakes, oceans, desert…all had left telltale signs in the rock. They saw a world of mostly slow change…but with the occasional disasters, local in scope not worldwide.

They had even realized the Earth must be far older than previously thought; the events they could read in the rocks simply could not have happened fast enough to fit within a few thousand years of time.

Impressive work. There were obviously a lot of unsolved problems (like how it could be possible that former sea floor bottom ended up high in the Alps), but still a lot learned.

Physics and astronomy (closely associated with each other) were pretty much the most successful and advanced branches of scientific knowledge. Were astronomers and physicists at least somewhat impressed with what geologists had come up with?

Perhaps but in one key respect the answer was probably more like, “You gotta be shitting me.”

You see the physicists and astronomers of the mid 1800s couldn’t possibly see how the Sun could be old; if the Sun weren’t old neither could the Earth be old. There was simply no way to power the sun for those lengths of time. However the geologic evidence was simply overwhelming.

Beyond suspecting that geologists were smoking something that was distinctly not a mineral (and vice versa from the geologists’ point of view), there was little that could be done. Tons of hard evidence (i.e., rocks) vs. quite well established kinetics and thermal physics. Neither of them could be shaken.

So what was the cause of this disconnect?

In 1862, William Thomson (1st Baron Kelvin…after whom the Kelvin scale is named), published calculations that assumed the Earth had started out completely molten, then computed how long it would take to cool to what we see today. His answer was 20 – 400 million years. OK, that seems a bit low to geologists, but not horrifically so. (He did not account for convection inside the Earth, which would increase the number…nor for other factors he simply couldn’t have imagined, which I’ll get to.)

The big problem was that he also computed how long the sun could have been shining at its present brightness, if it derived all of its energy from gravitational contraction. And that answer was 20 million years. It agreed with his Earth calculation at the low end so that made sense–Thomson probably reasoned that the Earth therefore had to be 20 million years old, but geologists (and biologists) simply couldn’t believe the Earth was that young. Other physicists (Hermann von Helmholz and Simon Newcomb) got similar values of 22 and 18 million years, respectively.

Other possible sources of solar energy were combustion and impacting comets and asteroids. The first was ridiculous. If the entire Sun, huge as it is, were a burning pile of coal, it would be gone within a couple of thousand years at the rate it would have to be burning to be as luminous as it is. This is not even long enough to carry us from the Great Pyramid to Julius Caesar, much less to today. Asteroid impacts sounds more promising, until one realizes there’d have to be so many of them that surely Earth would be catching a lot more of them than we actually are getting. And it was only good enough for a few hundred thousand years. The other flaw was that the sun would be increasing with size as more matter accumulated in it, and that imposed a strict time limit too…after a certain amount of time the Sun would simply be bigger than we see it.

Another tack taken by physicists and astronomers was to use the moon. George H. Darwin (son of Charles “the” Darwin) was an astronomer, figured out that if the Earth and Moon had split apart while still molten, tidal forces would have created our current situation with a 24 hour day after 56 million years. This may not look like it to you, but given the sorts of approximations that both Darwin’s and Kelvin’s calculations enailed, that’s actually close enough to Kelvin’s number that it appeared that both of them were likely on the right track. (When two totally different methods of computation give similar answers, that’s a powerful argument that the actual answer is pretty close to the ones we computed.) Yet another tack, computing how long it took for the oceans to accumulate the salt they contain, based on erosion of rocks, gave an answer of 80-100 million years for the age of the oceans.

When you see an apparent contradiction like this, something is missing from your mental picture. Or perhaps you have a wrong premise. Because an actual contradiction cannot exist.

And, as it turned out, one mineral, when it was discovered, turned out to be the beginning of the path not just to resolving this, but fulfilling another thing that was on the geologists’ wish list–one they never thought they’d get. Like the kid who doesn’t bother asking Santa for the really expensive toy for Christmas…but Santa read his mind and he gets it.

The mineral is an oxide, one called pitchblende. This was first described in 1772 by F. E. Brueckmann. In 1789 M. Klaproth worked with this stuff and discovered the element uranium.

[Uranium oxide has been in mosaic glass from Roman times; clearly they’d found some of the ore and experimented to see what it would do to color glass. However, we don’t have written records of the Romans recognizing it as a distinct material.]

Here’s some nice big crystals of pitchblende:

Uranium was nothing special, just another of a bunch of metals being discovered around this time. Along with such other favorites as cobalt, nickel, manganese, tungsten, niobium, tantalum, and chromium. Curiously, pitchblende also includes some lead, without fail. No such thing as “pure” uranium oxide pitchblende. That seems kind of weird because lead and uranium are chemically quite different.

Flawed analyses led to uranium’s atomic weight being calculated at 156 or so; later on the mistake was realized and the atomic weight was corrected to 238, far above anything else known at the time. Kind of interesting to geeks; no one else cared.

In 1895 this changed. And so did the world.

Henri Becquerel was trying to see if uranium salts, known to fluoresce in visible light, also fluoresced in X ray frequences. (X Rays had been discovered the year before by Röntgen.) [As a reminder, fluorescent things will glow in bright colors for a while after being exposed to ultraviolet light. This can actually be used to identify some minerals. Becquerel wanted to see if they also emitted X-rays alongside the visible light.] He’d expose the compounds to sunlight, then set them next to wrapped photographic plates. If the plates fogged, he would conclude the uranium compounds were giving off X-rays after being “charged” by the sun. Then he had days of cloudy weather, so he put the uranium salts and wrapped plates in a drawer while he awaited sunny days. Ultimately he decided, what the Hell, and developed the plates without exposing the uranium salts to sunlight, and found that they had fogged anyway. Well this was new!! Further experimentation established that uranium emitted strong radiation, all the time, no matter what.

Even more experimentation established that the uranium was turning into lead as it did this. Which is why pitchblende always has some lead in it, even though lead is very different from uranium, chemically.

This led to our current picture of the structure of an atom–which up to then had not been proven to exist. (The final piece of proof was supplied by Albert Einstein in 1905, the Annus Mirabilis)

That is a very long story. Detailed here (9 – End of Classical Physics (Rays & Radiation)):

2021·06·26 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (13 – Ernest Rutherford):

2021·08·07 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (17 – Nuclear Physics Finds a Hammer):

2021·09·04 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (19 – Antimatter):

2021·09·18 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (20 – The Little Neutral One (Neutrinos)):

2021·10·02 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

One key thing to note is that this new “radioactivity” was extremely energy intense, far more so than burning coal, and now we had a hints of a power source that would allow the sun to shine for hundreds of millions–even BILLIONS–of years.

And this is indeed the case, as described here (22 – Powering Stars):

2021·10·23 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And the world was never the same, because this ultimately led to nuclear weapons.

But for our purposes here, the main effect is that now there was no more contradiction about how old the Earth might be. The Sun could indeed be old enough for an old Earth.

And Now We Can Measure It

Surprise! We also now had a way to measure the age of some rocks, to put actual numbers on things.

To explain this adequately (given the fact that there are charlatans out there who try to fling mud on this, and some of you believe them), I’m going to try to do a Science For Senators review of radioactivity and nuclei. It’s a bit densely packed since I’m not telling a story here. (The story was in all those posts above.)

Matter is made up of atoms, very roughly a hundred picometers (a picometer is a trillionth of a meter) across. Most of this volume is taken up by electrons (which have a negative electrical charge) that are bound to a positively charged nucleus (plural, nuclei). The nucleus contains almost all of the mass of the atom yet occupies a space only a few femtometers (a femtometer is a quadrillionth of a meter across); roughly 1/10,000th the diameter of the atom as a whole.

The nucleus, in turn consists of protons–positively charged particles–and neutrons–neutrally charged particles. Other than the charge, these two particles are very similar to each other–the neutron is just a bit more massive–and they’re collectively referred to as nucleons. (Neutrons are blue, protons red in the diagram below…but they don’t actually have color and they’re not actually shaped like little hard spheres, so the diagram is notional.)

As it turns out the number of protons in a nucleus (the “atomic number”) determines what chemical element it is. One proton: hydrogen. Six: carbon. Eight: oxygen. Twenty-six: iron. Forty-seven: silver. Seventy-nine: gold. Eighty-two: lead. Ninety-two: uranium. (Plus all of the other numbers in between of course.) In order to balance out, an atom will have the same number of electrons as protons, at least until it starts sharing or even giving or taking electrons with, to, or from other atoms–which is what chemistry is all about.

The number of neutrons, on the other hand can vary, even within an element. Just for instance, most uranium nuclei have 146 neutrons in them, but some have only 143. This has very little effect on the chemistry, but it is possible to very painstakingly sort these out. The two different types of uranium are described by their mass numbers, the total number of nucleons. 92+146=238, and 92+143=235; uranium-238 and uranium-235, respectively. These different-weight forms of the same element are called isotopes.

As it turns out radioactivity, when it happens, happens to nuclei. There are two main kinds of radioactivity that matter for our purposes here, alpha decay and beta decay.

Alpha decay is when a large nucleus basically pukes up a helium nucleus (containing two protons and two neutrons–mass number of 4). Since the nucleus gives up two protons in doing this, it changes to another element; this should therefore happen five times as uranium turns to lead, changing the atomic number from 92 to 82. Except that that’s not actually right; it turns out to be eight times. That’s because uranium-238 is becoming lead-206; that’s a difference of 32 mass units and eight alpha decays does that.

The reason the atomic number changes by ten rather than 16 (two per alpha decay) is that there is also beta decay. In this kind of radioactive decay, a neutron turns into a proton, ejecting an electron (which flies off into the distance, so you can basically forget about it) and a neutrino (which flies off away forever, so you can really forget about it). The effect is to leave the mass number unchanged…but it increases the atomic number by one (we have one more proton than we used to). To make up the discrepancy noted above, uranium, in turning to lead, must undergo six beta decays.

Technically speaking what I just described is negative beta decay, because it spits out a negatively charged particle. The reason why one might to be anal about this is that there’s actually a different kind of beta decay that may come into play, though…and that’s positive beta decay, where a proton spits out an anti-electron (“positron”–yes, this is antimatter) and turns into a neutron (the exact opposite change from the first kind of beta decay). This causes the nucleus to go down one in atomic number, again without changing the mass number.

Uranium and thorium (atomic number 90) undergo alpha decay, as do a lot of the things they turn into on the way to becoming lead (as do many of the intermediate elements in between and on the way). A lot of the intermediate products undergo beta decay. That’s all stuff at the high end of the periodic table, though.

It turns out that a lot of much lighter elements…ones we thing of as stable…are at least partially made up of isotopes that do one or the other form of beta decay (there are dozens of examples). Even potassium has a long-lived isotope (potassium-40 or ⁴⁰K) that decays, in fact it can decay two different ways: negative beta decay or “electron capture” where a proton absorbs an electron. The first turns it into calcium-40, the second turns it into argon-40.

Our atmosphere is about one percent argon, and that argon is almost all argon-40. The sun’s argon–which presumably came from the nebula that condensed to form the solar system–is almost all argon-36, which leads to the conclusion that none of the Earth’s original argon is still around, and all of the argon in the atmosphere is actually from the decay of potassium-40.

There is just one thing I haven’t mentioned yet. Alpha and beta decay occur at constant rates. The rate is different for each nucleus, but constant for that nucleus. (All sorts of attempts have been made in laboratories to change the rate…with one oddball exception, absolutely nothing happened.) It’s a proportional thing; over some period of time, half of the atoms of some radioactive isotope will decay. You’re then left with a sample half the size of your original sample…and half of that will be gone after you wait the same period of time again. And so on. This period of time is known as the half life, because half of the atoms are gone after that period of time.

Of the things I’ve touched on, here are their half lives: Uranium-235: 703.8 million years. Potassium-40: 1251 million years. Uranium-238: 4458 million years. And Thorium-232: 14,050 million years.

And now maybe you can see how this might be useful to geologists. Find a rock with some uranium, thorium, or potassium in it. (Potassium most likely; it’s common compared to the others.) Then determine how much “daughter” product is in the rock. It helps if the daughter product is such it wouldn’t have been in the rock when it solidified. E.g., a zircon crystal, which might pick up uranium impurities as it crystalizes, but will positively reject lead atoms. Any lead in the zircon crystal can only have come from uranium decay. Count atoms (yes, you might have to literally count atoms) to determine how much daughter product there is, versus parent isotope. Figure out how much decay has taken place and compare to the half life.

You now know the age of the crystal. Not the relative age, the absolute age, of the crystal.

But there are a lot of details with this (including the fact that dating sedimentary rock is dicey), and I will cover some of them next time. These details, when fully considered only serve to make these methods rock solid.

Notice

I have a complex project coming up IRL, and I absolutely have to reallocate my “spare” time. This will mean less laughing at online flerfs, but it also means science posts will be infrequent and/or unpredictable.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

Our Turn

[Yes, I did this one fifteen weeks ago, just after the election. But it was too cathartic to just throw away.]

We’ve often seen that quote from David Plouffe: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”

This was of course a declaration of intent to annihilate not just Trump, but rather “his kind.”

You know what? I think we should flip it around. David Plouffe’s kind should be destroyed thoroughly and their kind must not rise again.

What is Plouffe’s kind? I suppose it depends on who’s talking and what they are thinking of in particular. Well, at the moment it’s me talking and I am thinking of the sort of maggot who is attracted to politics not to better his world but rather so that he can wield power over others, or line their pockets with “free” money. Often these people end up as what Ayn Rand called “pull peddlers,” receiving money in exchange for using their connections to do favors.

This type is parasitic. Utterly parasitic. And they should be destroyed thoroughly and not allowed to rise again.

The bad news is we will never eradicate them. Useless turds who can’t do anything productive will always be with us. As will the outright sociopaths.

Of course they find Trump to be their enemy. And of course they find us to be their enemy. If we won’t simply lie down and let our “betters” have their way with us, we’re a problem, we’re something to be got rid of. And of late, we haven’t lain down without a protest, as we are “supposed” to do. Dang uppity Garbage Deplorables! We don’t know our place!!!

The good news is we can provide far fewer niches for these parasites. The niches come into being when something that people formerly did of their own free will is taken over by the government; then every aspect of that activity becomes a political football.

Take for instance education. Since the government runs it, if you don’t like what’s being done, you have to form a political movement and try to work your way around the maggots embedded in the bureaucracy. If education were private, then if you didn’t like what they were doing to your child, you’d take your money and your child elsewhere. And people who didn’t even have school-age children presently would have no voice–and not have to pay money. Making it a government “thing” turned it into a political thing, and the maggots began to swarm.

So we wreck them by seriously cutting government and giving them fewer places to exist. Among all of the other benefits, the body politic would have fewer sociopaths and parasites in it.

People like Plouffe are the same type, but they are the full-on political hacks who set policy, rather than implement it. They’re just as bad if not worse; they help government grow, and steer it into serving its own ends, rather than those of the people it is supposed to be serving.

The Deep State is nothing more than a government that serves its own ends.

And we have had enough of this.

They must be destroyed thoroughly, and their kind must not rise again.

This election wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. There are millions of these malignancies in this country and we’ve just defeated two of them. Keep pushing. Now we can go after them wholesale.

It’s our turn.

Our turn.

Our turn.

OUR TURN!

You stole the 2020 election. You’ve mocked and ridiculed and put people in prison and broken people’s lives because you said this thing was stolen. This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden’s getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC is getting swept out. The Justice Department is getting swept out. The FBI is getting swept out. You people suck, okay?! And now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country.

And I’m going to tell you, we’re going to get to the bottom of where the 600,000 votes [are]. You manufactured them to steal this election from President Trump in 2020. And think what this country would be if we hadn’t gone through the last four years of your madness, okay? You don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity.

And if anybody gives it to you, it’s Donald J. Trump, because he’s got a big heart and he’s a good man. A good man that you’re still gonna try to put in prison on the 26th of this month. This is how much you people suck. Okay? You’ve destroyed his business thing. And he came back.

He came back in the greatest show of political courage, I think, in world history. Like, [Roman statesman] Cincinnatus coming back from the plough [returning to politics to rescue the Roman Republic]. He’s the American Cincinnatus. And what he has done is a profile in courage. We’ve had his back. But I got to tell you, he may be empathetic. He may have a kind heart. He may be a good man. But we’re not. Okay? And you deserve, as Natalie Winters says, not retribution, justice. But you deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.

Steve Bannon, on election night

OUR TURN!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

January 6 Tapes?

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.

If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…

Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.

Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.

Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.

I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.

In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.

Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.

The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”

Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.

We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.

And yet,

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?

In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).

We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)

We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Lauren Boebert?).

That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.

Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”

If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.

That should make you good and mad.

The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.

I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.

In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.

In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.

So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.

We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*

We know it. What is going to be done about it?

*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.

If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.

But what is it?

Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.

Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 or 2026 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

Martin Luther King

When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice

President Donald Trump, 20 January 2017 (The “Dark” Inauguration Speech).

[NOTE: Yes, technically this is something I should delete since it’s not January 18th any more and it is dated, but I decided to give it one more run, because some things said here don’t depend on what’s showing on the page-a-day calendar.]

….But I’ll still say something about MLK. He was a decidedly mixed individual. As are we all. But I think he, and many others of his time, did something important and unpleasant; he (and those others) forced a recognition that even after the Civil War we were being hypocritical on the subject of equality under the law. Those people who descended from those who (shall we say) involuntarily migrated to what is now the United States were still getting the shitty end of the stick in many parts of this country, as a matter of law.

He was one hundred percent correct on that.

Unfortunately his successors have turned the point full circle and want a leg up from the law, supposedly to make up for the past mistreatment, but that can only lead to an endless round of back and forth. There are some signs that MLK himself had he not been killed (he would be turning 96 this year were he still alive), would have been right alongside the race baiters (which include some who were with him), other signs that he wouldn’t have.

But just as Thomas Jefferson penned these words, in spite of owning slaves, the words that eventually shamed us into abolishing the “peculiar institution”:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…

I’ll go with what Martin Luther King said…not all that far from where the Inauguration will take place:

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Emphasis mine. Judge people by the content of their character.

That is as it should be.

I see that at Trump rallies. His words about opening hearts to patriotism were true.

I see nothing but reverse racism on the Left. To them the world is defined by what one group does to another, some group must be on top shitting on everyone else. And it shows. There’s a false dichotomy in their thinking. Either white shits on black, or black shits on white. The way to deal with this false dichotomy, though, is not to gin up a third “group” to make it a trichotomy, or a fourth group to make it, what, a tetrachotomy? quadrichotomy? Is either of those actually a word? Gee maybe we can have a different group on top every week of the year at least until some jackass makes up a 53rd group! (Let’s leave aside the one or two day remainder you get from dividing 365(or 6) by 7. These are leftists studying critical race theory, not mathematicians.)

How about we do something different? How about we work towards a system where the law shits on NO ONE except those who violate the rights of others?

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 Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,883.10
Silver $32.22
Platinum $984.00
Palladium $992.00
Rhodium $4,975.00
FRNSI* 138.470-
Gold:Silver 89.482-

This week, at Friday close:

Gold $2,936.30
Silver $32.53
Platinum $980.00
Palladium $990.00
Rhodium $4,975.00
FRNSI* 141.044-
Gold:Silver 90.265+

Gold dipped a tiny bit Friday from its Thursday high mark. Silver dropped 46 cents. Par for the course; silver just can’t keep up with gold for whatever reason. As a result the gold:silver ratio just busted 90, again (it was this high a few weeks ago).

And of course the FRNSI is up, having handily busted the 140 mark.

*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.

A Canadian Talks Back

Here’s a video from a Canadian’s Youtube channel. That channel normally is about urban planning or something like that, but he’s stressed out about the “51st State” stuff. And the tariffs.

If this person’s attitude is typical of the Canadian in the street…well, it’s interesting.

I admit I can’t understand what PDJTs play is here. (I think I may have figured out Greenland.) I understand the tariffs; I don’t understand the “51st state” even though I’m aware he might not actually want to take over Canada and then give it statehood. At first I thought he was simply trolling TrueDope, but if so that would have ended when TrueDope announced he was stepping down. Anyhow, maybe someone reading this has ideas that make some sense of this.

The Final Experiment: More Hypocrisy from the Flerfs

The Flerfs have been going over the videos taken in Antarctica with a fine-toothed comb, and when one of them thinks they’ve found an irregularity, he trumpets it.

And then the others mindlessly echo it. In other words they hold normal people up to a microscope and apply zero critical thinking to claims made by their own side.

Up to 14:06, Jeran allegedly said the sun set in Antarctica, while there. No amount of denials on Jeran’s part will sway them. After 14:06 the clowns don’t know how to read a file listing.

Meanwhile Flat Earth Dave, a/k/a Dirth a/k/a Potato finds his bluff called discussing things with an MIT physicist, who wants to set up a big formal working group to design experiments (starting at 2:38:30 and running through 3:50:00 at least though it gets good at about 3:40:00–at 3:55:00 Flat Earth Dave realizes he’s fucked). Throughout this whole conversation MC Toon analyzes Dave’s cult recruiting techniques.

And his leaking-like-a-sieve app is about to get him in BIG trouble in multiple countries.

Potato was moderating the chat in a livestream Witsit was holding, and people started coming in to say his app leaked, and he spent a half an hour banning those people, starting around 17 minutes in, picking up steam at about 26 minutes.

Glaciation

Another method of wearing down the landscape that we often see today is glaciation. And it leaves behind very obvious signs, enough so that we can chart the extent of glaciation during the geologically recent Ice Age.

Though to be sure we are still in the ice age. We just happen to be in the middle (I hope it’s the middle and not the end) of an “interglacial,” a temporary retreat of the glaciers. The interglacial started in roughly 10,000 BCE (I usually see 9,700 BCE) and that is the beginning of the current epoch, the Holocene. (As a reminder, an epoch is the largest subdivision of a period; a period is something like the Cambrian, Permian, Jurassic, Cretaceous, or Quaternary (the one we’re in), and periods are the third level of subdivision of geologic time after the eon and era.)

[As a complete aside, some advocate for changing our year numbering, by adding 10,000 to them, which would make this the year 12,025. The advantage is that there would be no negative dates throughout human recorded history, yet any idiot can convert the new date back to the old for anything that’s not “BC”. Doing so would pretty closely align with the Holocene, so this is called the “Holocene Calendar.” NB that the year 10,001 is 1 CE, and the year 10,000 is 1 BCE (there was no zero in our current system). Using this system: Julius Caesar was assassinated in 9957 HE; Alexander the Great died in 9678 HE, and the Great Pyramid was built in about 7400 HE, but most importantly Trump began his second term in 12025 HE.]

OK so how do we detect past glaciation? It helps to understand what glaciers are. They are ice, but they start out as snow falling in places where it never has the chance to melt; today that’s high up in mountains, in Greenland, and in Antarctica. Even in those latter areas, though it tends to start in the interior high areas of those landmasses.

As the snow piles up it compresses and gets packed into ice. Ice is not particularly hard stuff (compared to rocks), and will eventually start to flow under the pressure, once it’s about 30 meters (100 feet) thick. There’s still some trace of the layered structure of the snow and these layers are relatively weakly bonded to each other. So a glacier is in many ways like a super-super slow river. A typical speed is about one meter per day though that can vary greatly. Imagine a glacier forming way up in a mountain valley, and then flowing downhill.

Here’s an example, from Denali Mt McKinley. (Incidentally, Wikipedia has not changed the name yet, but searching for “Mt. McKinley” redirects to “Denali.”)

You’ll note the flat area on the left that sort of looks like a river; that’s the top of a glacier. And if you look closely, you’ll even see tributaries on the right hand side, smaller glaciers flowing from smaller valleys into this glacier, with black stripes marking the boundaries. The color differences are generally due to stuff falling onto the top of the glacier; if that happens more in one “tributary” than another, there will be a color difference when they merge.

Some glaciers are actually lubricated by a thin layer of meltwater where they touch the ground; this can be from geothermal activity, or just the sheer mass of the glacier melting the ice, the same way the blade of an ice skate will momentarily melt the water under the skate. This helps the glacier “flow” more quickly.

The upper layers of a glacier have less stress on them than lower layers and don’t want to flow. They’re essentially being carried along by the layers underneath, and will actually crack if the glacier goes over some irregularity in the terrain below, creating crevasses, like here:

If snow should happen to fall on this sort of thing and obscure it, it can be deadly. In fact, the Union Glacier camp in Antarctica is marked off by flags; if you go beyond those flags you could step onto a hidden crevasse and at that point you’re likely dead before you can be rescued. On the other hand geologists will sometimes deliberately descend into crevasses to take samples. Not for the faint-hearted.

So…how can we tell a glacier used to be somewhere but has since melted away?

One way, that works in mountains, is to note the shapes of the mountains and valleys. Glaciers tend to leave wide, U shaped valleys. They also tend to leave pyramidal-shaped mountains, because they will eat away at the mountain and often there are several glaciers off the same mountain. As they eat back into the mountain they will leave sharp edges between adjacent glaciers. Both of these can be seen in this notional diagram:

A cirque is a depression formed by a glacier, if and when it melts, a lake or pond called a tarn may be left behind. Cirques seem to form at the very heads of glacial valleys (I can’t quite find a statement that straightforward, but all the diagrams I see imply it). Neighboring glaciers leave sharp ridges called aretes, the ends of fingers of rock can be ground away by a main glacier to leave a truncated spur, and the mountain at the middle ends up becoming a horn…as in Matterhorn.

Compare a picture of the Southern Rockies in Wyoming:

To the Northern Rockies well into Canada, Banff Park:

Notice that the Canadian peaks are much sharper (and OhByTheWay note the blatantly obvious layering of the sedimentary rocks in those mountains); they’ve been worked over by glaciers and the Southern Rockies in Colorado and Wyoming have not. In fact the lake is Moraine Lake because it appears in a moraine.

When a glacier is doing it’s thing there are two ways it can grind down the terrain it’s on, plucking and abrasion.

Plucking is where the glacier actually uproots rocks–even parts of bedrock–as it passes over them. It’s aided in doing so by having subglacial water get into cracks in the rock and then freezing; that breaks up rocks fairly quickly. Rocks of many different sizes get plucked and incorporated into the underside of the glacier.

Here is a landscape that had much of its rock plucked away at some time in the past, the Aland Islands in the Baltic Sea.

Which leads to the second method, abrasion: Now the bottom of the glacier is like rough grit sandpaper and as the glacier flows grooves or striations can be cut in the underlying rock, as shown here in Mount Rainier national park:

Here’s an illustration showing the two at work. Note that as the glacier goes over the hump, crevasses open up as the top layers flex.

The rock ground away in this fashion becomes fine powder a few thousandths of a millimeter in diameter.

All this suspended rock, the stuff that fell on top of the glacier and the stuff it picked up through plucking and abrasion, eventually gets out of the glacier.

If the glacier ends on land, it can dump a lot of its load as it melts and retreats; this is called glacial till. This ends up as fine sediment with larger rocks in it, in moraines. Also quite a bit can be carried by the stream coming out from under the glacier–all that subglacial water is now released.

The furthest a glacier got before beginning is often revealed by a ridge called a terminal moraine, which can often be seen long after the glacier is completely gone. These are used to determine the extent of the last glaciation that covered much of North America and Europe.

A melting glacier will drop the large stuff it contains, too. If the glacier was particularly large, it might have carried things hundreds of miles, such as these rocks from Norway found in the Netherlands; these are called “glacial erratics”:

However it’s much more common to get smaller rocks appearing in a matrix of finer-grained rock, like this:

When a geologist sees this, it practically screams that a glacier left this behind.

If the glacier gets out over water and starts calving icebergs, those boulders melt out and drop right down into what would otherwise be a nice orderly layering of sediment. This photo is of just such a dropstone and is iconic.

Here’s another…from Namibia. Remember this; I’ll get back to it.

Thus far I’ve been talking about glaciers termed “alpine” and “valley” glaciers, because they start way up in some valley in the mountains…somewhere. But sometimes, a glacier can completely cover a mountain or volcano, as seen in Iceland; that’s called an icecap. But there are even bigger ones; anything over about 50,000 square kilometers is called an ice sheet or a continental glacier. Today there are two of those: Greenland and Antarctica. These tend to flow outward in all directions from a center. We can detect former ice sheets by looking for all of these landforms and even tell where the center was from the direction of the striations left by abrasion. Here is the Laurentide ice sheet from the last glaciation. (For some reason, forms of the word “Laurentian” get applied to North America by geologists.) Note it’s actually contiguous with the “Cordilleran” ice sheet over the Canadian Rockies, and the Innuitian Ice Sheet over the northern Arctic Islands…and the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is still with us today albeit a bit smaller. Iceland was completely covered; its current icecap now confined to the interior of the island was larger back then. The Rockies further south had much more limited glaciation.

The weight of all of that ice (it can be thousands of feet thick) can actually push down the rocks underneath it. The rocks underlying the Earth’s crust are plastic and will flow, if you push on them hard enough and for a long enough time. Then when the ice melts, there’s not nearly as much weight there any more and the land slowly rises. The area around the Great Lakes is still undergoing “isostatic rebound” (or “postglacial rebound”) as the rock continues to rise after the weight of the ice is gone. The Great Lakes essentially fill a depression formed by the weight of the ice; depending on how much rebounding happens they may eventually empty out as the depression ceases to exist.

While a glacier is in the process of melting “proglacial” lakes can form, either dammed by ice that hasn’t melted, or in cirques (the aforementioned tarns), or behind terminal moraines. Sometimes these lakes can be very large and if caused by an ice dam, a major flood can happen when it breaks open. Lake Agassiz is an example. It has been known for quite some time; here’s a map drawn in the 19th century by Warren Upham.

(And there’s that word “Laurentian” again in the title). Note also labelings of Keewatin and Assiniboia for parts of Canada now in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Northern Ontario. Canada tended to give “new” territory to already existing provinces.)

Lake Agassiz may even have been larger than the Caspian Sea at one point. But once enough ice melted in what is now Hudson Bay, torrents of water–a million cubic meters per second–likely poured into Hudson Bay and thence out into the Atlantic. Sea levels probably rose anywhere from 0.8 to 2.8 meters from this one event alone. But that was only the more recent formation and melting of the lake, the prior one 13000 years ago may have caused the Younger Dryas cooling worldwide.

Here is a a diagram reconstructing the history of what is now the Great Lakes. Notice 4000 years ago the Ottawa River drained Lake Huron.

Glacial lakes, while they exist and are fed by meltwater, can have sediment deposited in their beds and these are known as varves. (I see conflicting information on whether varves only happen in glacial lakes, or any lakes, but everything I read agrees they form in fresh water, not salt water.) The layers are annual, a repeating sequence every year, like the alternating light-and-dark bands of tree rings. What causes the annual structure? Springtime runoff is much more energetic and brings larger particles with the water, so one can see alternating coarse/fine layers in the sediment. The reason for thinking varves cannot form in salt water is that the salt will cause clay particles to clump together, erasing the fine/coarse/fine/coarse sequencing. It’s therefore much harder to see annual layers in ocean-deposited sediment.

Varves can be correlated over limited distances and sequences up to 50,000 years long have been assembled, in a process similar to dendrochronology, where tree ring sequences have extended back over ten thousand years. This is a recent varve formation in Japan. More ancient ones running for twenty million annual layers have been found.

One might argue that the assumption that the layers are annual, though plausible (seasonal changes in seasonal water flow are quite plausible), are unwarranted. Note though that those making this argument are arguing for a young earth, and generally they want to believe that all of the varves were laid down within one year. But that twenty million layer formation would still be 50,000 years old if the varves were laid down once a day, and the 50,000 years of the lake in Japan would have taken well over a century at that rate. And the sediments within the varves are simply too fine to have settled out that fast, so thinking about an even faster rate is even more unreasonable. But leaving that one aside, sometimes there is an event that causes a non-annual layer to form, such as a flash flood. But we’ve seen these happen, and they are invariably quite irregular (due to turbulence in the water, I am guessing) and easy to tell from a ‘regular’ annual varve–we’ve also watched those happen and they’re nice and regular. Varves laid down in the past generally look like the annual varves being laid down today, and we can account for the irregular ones that don’t. Another factor is that we can detect seasonal pollen changes in recent varves. And we can date organic fragments in recently-laid-down varves via radiocarbon dating (and I will get to such methods of dating soon), and those results are consistent with annual layers.

Not the First Ice Age

The current intermittent Ice Age began at the beginning of the Quaternary period; indeed that’s how the Quaternary is defined.

I’m going to bring the outline of eons, eras, and periods in from a few weeks ago, to refresh our memories. I’m going to highlight certain things I’ll discuss below, and also expand the Cenozoic.

• Phanerozoic (the current eon/eonthem)
  • Cenozoic (the current era/erathem)
    • Quaternary
      • Holocene
      • Pleistocene
    • Neogene
      • Pliocene
      • Miocene
    • Paleogene
      • Oligocene
      • Eocene
      • Paleocene
  • Mesozoic
    • Cretaceous
    • Jurrasic
    • Triassic
  • Paleozoic
    • Permian
    • Carboniferous (Mississippian + Pennsylvanian)
    • Devonian
    • Silurian
    • Orodivician
    • Cambrian
• Proterozoic
  • Neoproterozoic
    • Ediacaran
    • Cryogenian
    • Tonian
  • Mesoproterozoic
    • 3 periods
  • Paleoproterozoic
    • 4 periods
• Archean
  • Neoarchean
  • Mesoarchean
  • Paleoarchean
  • Eoarchean
• Hadean (starts with the formation of the Earth)

But it wasn’t the first and it is far from being the worst. We have been able to detect the signs of widespread glaciation in the late Paleozoic (late Devonian through late Permian), an early Paleozoic ice age running from the late Ordovician into the Silurian, and a Huronian ice age, during the early Proterozoic (that’s the eon before the current Phanerozoic, so this was quite some time ago! All of these highlighted above.

But there was also a late Proterozoic ice age, and it was a doozy. As might be suggested from the fact that the name “Cryogenian” suggests “cryogenics” and other things having to do with cold.

The Cryogenian was established as a recognized period in 1990, so it’s fairly “new” in that respect.

The entire world froze over. All of it. At least, everything we can find today shows it happening–we can’t tell what was happening in the mid-oceans. Not only that this happened twice, in events called the Sturtian and Marinoan glaciations (named after epochs within the Cryogenian). That Namibian rock was not dropped recently; Namibia wasn’t affected by the recent ice ages.

But with very little doubt every continent on Earth was blanketed by these two glaciations.

Here’s a map as best as we can reconstruct things that happened that long ago. You’ll note the continents are in very different locations (USA south of the equator and rotated 90 degrees clockwise, just for instance); we’ll get to that in a future post.

The Sturtian lasted most of the Cryogenian, and the Cryogenian was a LONG period, longer than the Cretaceous. (The preceding Tonian was much longer.) Before the Cryogenian, there are possible fossils of something resembling sponges. I have some difficulty imagining any multicellular life surviving what turns out to be tens of millions of years of the Earth being mostly if not entirely covered with ice, in an extreme case looking superficially like Jupiter’s moon Europa.

This was well before the Cambrian “explosion” of fossils that resemble things alive today; it’s possible that this age wiped out any multicellular life that was out there and cleared the way for things more familiar to us (except that we don’t know yet how the Ediacaran life fits in to that–so what I just said is worth exactly what you paid for it).

How do we know this happened? Because there are glacial deposits everywhere on Earth from this time period. More precisely, on every continent, if we can find Cryogenian systems, they show signs of glaciations; not like the Quaternary events where the evidence of glaciation is confined to the northern parts of Earth and, of course (duh) Antarctica. Here’s one of the right age (Neoproterozoic) from Idaho:

You should have no problem recognizing this for what it is, though of course you can’t date the rock with your eyeballs, so you don’t know from this picture when it is.

The one thing we can’t quite be certain of is whether the oceans completely froze over; no oceanic floor rocks survive from then (again, something that will be discussed in a future post). It’s also possible some thin ribbons of land remained uncovered. But if not, if the whole planet truly froze over, well, we call that “Snowball Earth.” If some parts were exposed…that’s “Slushball Earth.”

So what happened? The thing about ice ages is, at the start they are a positive feedback loop. If it gets a bit colder, and more ocean freezes over, that white ice (covering deep blue ocean) increases the Earth’s albedo, meaning we reflect more light and heat, and absorb less, so the Earth cools down more. Which creates more pack ice, which lowers the albedo again. Without some sort of counterbalancing effect, everything freezes. And this time there doesn’t seem to have been any counterbalancing effect.

In some ways the more interesting question is why, having gone global or nearly so, it ever ended. We may have volcanoes to thank for that, as they gradually pumped more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. With no plant life to consume it, it simply warmed the planet to the point where the ice could start to melt…and then the feedback now runs in the opposite direction; more dark oceans increase heat retention. So after tens of millions of years, the Sturtian is over. But the respite isn’t long, because the Marinoan began some time after that…running roughly ten million years.

One can imagine an alien exploratory vessel coming by during this period, looking at the Snowball Earth, and saying, “No point in tarrying. Uninhabitable. Nothing multicellular will ever live here.”

I’ve hinted here at some durations, and these came from subtracting two sets of absolute dates. But I haven’t actually covered absolute dating…so that’s next.

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

January 6 Tapes?

Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

Evading Reality

Many things the Left believes are simply not true. Right now the focus is on the size and scope of our government, and the many many billions of dollars the government has been spending on no-one-knew-what. None of that money is going to a key role of government. Which, after all, has the sole purpose of protecting rights.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss this as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.

As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.

And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.

So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things, well here we go for another week of WINNING against the Deep State.

I confess that the novelty has not worn off.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Yes, we won this time around. Not only did we win, we got to KEEP that win instead of having it stolen from us.

But no one should imagine that that’s the end of electoral fraud. Much work needs to be done to ensure it doesn’t just happen again next time around. And incidentally to rescue those states currently in the grips of self-perpetuating fraud, where the people who stole the last election, make sure it’s easier to steal the next one.

This issue, though it’s not front-and-center right now, is not going away, and if we ignore it, we’ll pay the price. See the article above about the consequences of evading reality.

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 Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $2,861.10
Silver $31.89
Platinum $984.00
Palladium $990.00
Rhodium $5,025.00
FRNSI* 137.406-
Gold:Silver 89.718-

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $2,883.10
Silver $32.22
Platinum $984.00
Palladium $992.00
Rhodium $4,975.00
FRNSI* 138.470-
Gold:Silver 89.482-

Gold went up nicely this week and closed in the 2920s Thursday. And then it got beaten with the ugly stick on Friday, dropping 45.60. Although silver took a hit on Friday, also, it wasn’t as bad so this week we see the gold:silver ratio dropping just a bit. Still it’s nowhere near the 83-ish range it was in not so long ago.

*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.

The Final Experiment Fallout

The fallout continues.

Jeran is now a glober. To those who have been following this for years (and no, I am not one of them), it’s simply stunning; they could never have imagined it. Austin Witsit has been trying to figure out how he got “fooled” which means he is looking for excuses to remain a flat Earther. It’s an interesting study in psychology. They both saw the same things. One had an epiphany, the other is burrowing deeper into the bullshit that the sights ought to have blasted away.

But of late something else has caught my attention. A South African who goes by the name “Flatzoid” is running hard to be the most obliviously stupid person on the face of the Earth. And yes he has quite a bit of competition from a lot of people on the Left, but from what I see he is up to the challenge.

[Take for instance the fact that he is South African, yet hasn’t noticed that the sun doesn’t rise and set where it should (i.e., to the northeast and northwest) if flat Earth were correct. He once even attempted to measure its sunrise position, and did so on video so people could see he was using a method guaranteed to introduce error. Sure enough he got an answer a few degrees off, loudly trumpeted that the globe earth couldn’t make the prediction…and ignored the fact it was many times further off any conceivable flat earth prediction. Not that they actually make predictions that aren’t just copying off of Globe Earth’s paper during the test.]

It’s referred to as the “upper left” award by the globe defenders; this is an allusion to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is commonly depicted on a graph like this:

The “upper left” is the peak of stupid but confident, or even arrogant. In this case Flatzoid has accused people far more knowledgeable than he is of being incompetent, and has said so to them in online meetings and debates.

In the case I’m thinking of his target is an Aussie engineer (with almost the same education background that I have), who goes online by “Critical Think” (which makes it very hard to find his channel).

This video is a reaction by an engineer, to the debate between Fkatzoid and Critical Think.

(Warning: You are about to see the worst case of Dunning-Kruger ever. Fkatzoid has no comprehension of the experiment, no actual conception of what it means to control variables, no conception of measurement error, and is so smugly confident he knows more than Critical Think that it can be infuriating at times.)

Flatzoid was on the list to be invited to The Final Experiment, but complained (as his excuse not to go) that he never received an invite. Will Duffy told him (in a livestream) that that was because his email did not appear on his youtube channel page. Flatzoid hastily went to add it so he could claim it had been there all along, but fatfingered his name and it showed as fkatzoid@<whatever the provider was>, so now he’s often called fkatzoid by Globe defenders.

Critical Think was not only invited, but actually did go on the Final Experiment. And he did something very interesting. He brought a very accurate electronic scale with him, along with its test weights. He has been taking those things to various places (like Malaysia), himself lives in (IIRC) Brisbane Australia, and had it with him in Chile–Santiago and Puntas Arenas. And of course Union Glacier camp in Antarctica.

What was he hoping to prove? He was hoping to validate the WGS-84 model of the Earth’s shape. Earth is a very slightly oblate spheroid (not enough so to look “squashed” in pictures–in fact proportionately speaking it easily meets the specs for cue balls) on account of its rotation. This has two effects on the gravity: 1. At the poles you are closer to the center of the Earth than you are at the equator, so you should feel very slightly stronger gravity. 2. The centrifugal effect of the rotating earth should reduce the net gravity on the equator, because the centrifugal effect partly counteracts the pull of the Earth’s mass. #2 is by far the larger of these two effects.

How does one check this? By measuring the force of gravity in different places using the same masses.

You can do this with a scale…but it has to be the right kind of scale. And you have to know how to use it.

And in order for this to make sense, you must understand the distinction between weight and mass. Which Flatzoid clearly does not.

Mass is the amount of “stuff” in an object, and it manifests as a resistance to forces applied to it. You can feel this by trying to push on objects. (Don’t try to lift them for this part.) To wipe out the effect of friction, pick the object up, hold it in your hand, then move your hand toward or away from you. If the object is massive enough you’ll definitely feel it “resisting” the force you’re applying.

This resistance is the same everywhere. Here on Earth. Anywhere on earth. In outer space. You’d feel it even in orbit on the ISS. The Moon. Mars. Jupiter (if there were a surface to stand on). And so on. The same.

Weight on the other hand is the force exerted on the object. The weight of something is actually the force with which it is being pulled, by the Earth.

This is why you can weigh differently on (say) the Earth and the Moon, even without a trip to the bathroom on the way from one to the other, in other words, even though your mass stays the same. The force exerted by gravity is different, and weight is the force.

The distinction usually doesn’t matter for us “groundhogs” here on Earth. Hence there’s a tendency even for STEM people working their STEM jobs to conflate the two. Pounds are actually a unit of force, but it’s not hard to find references to something called “pounds mass” in, say, rocketry, where a lot of the industry stuck with the US Customary System until fairly recently–it’s the mass that on the surface of the earth weighs one pound. (Oh and by the way our customary system is not the “imperial” system as I’ve heard many people call it lately: if you don’t believe that note the difference in volume measurements. A US gallon is smaller than an Imperial one.) So it’s quite correct to say that 100 lb (when she is on Earth) woman weighs 16.5 lbs on the Moon.

The kilogram, the SI unit, is actually a unit of mass. But people are happy to talk about things weighing a kilogram, really meaning (whether they realize it or not): weighing as much as a kilogram does on Earth. (The SI unit of force is the Newton, and to be truly correct, a kilogram of mass weighs 9.8 Newtons. But absolutely no one makes a scale reading in Newtons, though pressure measurements (“pounds per square inch” to us) and torque do reference Newtons.)

Let’s not forget we’re eventually getting back to Fkatzoid vs. Critical Think.

There are two ways to measure “weight” (one of them actually measures mass). 1) A balance beam scale. This is the conceptually simplest variant:

This works by comparing the force exerted by gravity on whatever it is you want to weigh, against the force exerted on known weights. If the two pans are in balance (as indicated by the long vertical bar pointing up from the pivot point), the two forces are equal, and therefore the two weights are equal. For this kind of scale, though, there’s a bonus: You also know the two masses are equal. It can actually be used to measure mass. It would work if you took it to the Moon; the mass of your object would be the same as the mass of the known weights in the other pan, and you will get the same reading.

There are more complex versions of this, including ones with sliding weights where the known weight is moved closer or farther, to balance things like having people of two different weights on a seesaw. The lighter one has to move further out.

If you remember those scales at your doctor’s office with the sliding weights, that’s this kind of scale; it’s set up so that you “hang” from a place very close to the pivot, while the sliding weights are further away; they therefore exert more leverage and a balance can be struck without actually putting something as heavy as you are on the balance beam.

The second kind of scale essentially measures the compression or stretching of a spring (or some other device sensitive to force) caused by gravity pulling on whatever it is you’re weighing.

Springs (et. all.) do their thing in response to a force, so these scales measure force. Take a 1 kilogram mass and a scale like this (that reads off in kg though it should technically read off in Newtons) to the moon and it will read 165.4 grams, not 1000 grams. That’s because it’s really measuring a force then, under the assumption it’s being used in Earth’s gravity, converting to read in kilograms. (If you are ever in such a situation, don’t be fooled into thinking the mass has changed.)

Your bathroom scale, the scale you use to measure ingredients in the kitchen, the scale at the deli and the scale at the post office are all this type (unless you’re like me and bought a used medical scale). If you reload you may have a balance beam scale of some type for the powder.

OK, so now to Critical Think’s experiment. He has a scale…of the second type, and it came with a kilogram mass.

Normally, you’d set up the scale, turn it on, make sure it zeros…and then you calibrate it. How? you put the kilogram mass on it, and push a button, which tells it that the force it is detecting right now is from local gravity acting on a one kilogram mass. It’s then smart enough to know what to do if it feels twice that force: it will tell you that what you’ve put on the scale has a mass of two kilograms. Likewise for any other mass: read out in proportion to that force which it has been taught means there’s a mass of one kilogram.

Why the need to calibrate the scale? Because if you don’t, it will be thrown off by the slight differences in the Earth’s gravitational field. Mountaintops, latitude, depressions like Death Valley or the Dead Sea, etc. will all change the force ever so slightly, and by calibrating the scale, you get it to correct for that.

What if you move the scale to another location, and don’t calibrate it? Your mass readings will be off by a bit, because the force you measure isn’t the same. It’s a small amount, a few hundredths of a gram per kilogram, but nonetheless measurable by Critical Think’s scale.

So this is what he did: He calibrated the scale at home. So in his house, the weights read 1000 g. He then takes the scale and weights somewhere else, and repeats the measurement without calibrating the scale. So the 1 kilogram mass now weighs a bit more or a bit less, and the difference is actually due to the difference in gravity.

On returning home, you weight your kilogram mass again to make sure the scale actually did hold its initial calibration. If the scale doesn’t read 1000 g again, something actually fell out of adjustment in the scale.

Critical Think’s data (multiple weighings of the known mass at each site), by the time you do the stats work that every scientist must do with their data, confirms the WGS-84 ellipsoid combined with the rotation of the Earth.

But it’s key: for this to work, you must not calibrate the scale at the other locations. Otherwise all you’ve done is show that the scale will report 1000g every time you calibrate it.

This is totally, completely beyond Fkatzoid’s comprehension. He insists that because Critical Think did not calibrate the scale at each location, the entire experiment is worthless–oblivious to the fact that the point of the experiment was to use the same calibration in different areas.

Furthermore Fkatzoid has no conception of measurement error. Critical Think took multiple readings at each location, and averaged them. This is standard operating procedure when taking data, because of measurement error. However, when this came out in the conversation, that the multiple readings had all been slightly different from each other, Fkatzoid triumphantly declared all of the data worthless, because it wasn’t “repeatable.”

And finally, Fkatzoid insists that temperature and humidity are factors that must be taken into account. Why? Because. Because what? Because. It turns out that Critical Think actually checked these beforehand, by varying the temperature and humidity at home and seeing what effect they had on the scale (by again, calibrating once then measuring under different temperatures and pressures–and noting that they had no significant effect, so he could from that point forward ignore them so long as he stayed within the operating temperature range of the scale. This point, too, is completely lost on Fkatzoid.

He’s trying to argue about basic science with an experienced engineer. Not that experienced engineers are automatically right by any means, nor are they necessarily geniuses. But engineering is where the scientific rubber meets the road in a way that’s visible to everyone. All branches of engineering must study and understand physics at a bare minimum (many branches have to go into other disciplines like chemistry as well), and they must apply it to solve real-world problems.

If the physics they understand doesn’t have a close relationship to reality, their solutions can’t work. And sometimes they “don’t work” badly enough to kill people. The Romans knew this. Their engineers would have to stand under the arches they designed, as the blocking for construction was removed. If the engineer had messed up…he died. Better him than someone who had trusted him.

There are certainly plenty of examples of engineering failures in history. (Engineers get to learn about them!) But even those who fail when pushing the envelope understand the basics.

Fkatzoid never had to learn any science past the third grade level (complete with all of the oversimplifications made to get the basic concept across) and it shows here. I don’t think I’ve every seen someone more obliviously but arrogantly ignorant than Fkatzoid.

And in the wake of the Final Experiment, he’s one of the leaders of the Flat Earth movement.

No Geology This Time

I will try to write something up this weekend, for next weekend.