Keith Olbermann is an idiot...
Jul. 11th, 2009 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsAs you know, I'm no fan of the Intelligent Design idiocies and the associated anti-evolutionary thinking. Every child in every classroom infested with those memes is one child fewer that might go on to be a scientist and produce the next great breakthrough in medicine agriculture. To date, not a single meaningful technological advance has been made using intelligent design as the premise. It has been as useful to us as Aristotelian physics.
So I wasn't surprised when Olbermann chose Arizona State Senator Silvia Allen's little comment, while defending a local uranium mine's lax environmental post-processing policies, "The Earth has been here 6,000 years, long before anyone had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn't been done away with."
But I was disgusted when Olbermann proceeded to make fun of the fact that Allen's comment about the age of the Earth came in the context of a discussion about uranium mining. Olbermann asserted, "The way we can know the Earth is billions of years old is because of the decay of uranium. Carbon dating!"
Sigh.
Someone tell Keith that uranium is only a mediocre dating choice because of its uniformity. It's hard to tell how much uranium a sample started with, therefore it's hard to date. Much better choices are rubidium, potassium, and strontium, all of which have multiple decay products that can be measured in ratio to one another to produce accurate results.
As for "carbon dating," carbon is an entirely different element from uranium, and is used for the dating of recently dead things, as it is only accurate out to about 50,000 years, and is only good for dating organics. (Living things have a regular flow of carbon in and out as they eat and breath; it's only after fossilization that carbon transference stops and we can reliably date the organism's age from the decay of carbon left.).
So Keith is an idiot. He should consult with a geek before he goes off, again, with an idiotic rant of that flavor. Apparently, an MSNBC peer, Ed Schultz, made a similar mistake, claiming that the Earth is only a billion years old. It's about 4.5 billion.
So I wasn't surprised when Olbermann chose Arizona State Senator Silvia Allen's little comment, while defending a local uranium mine's lax environmental post-processing policies, "The Earth has been here 6,000 years, long before anyone had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn't been done away with."
But I was disgusted when Olbermann proceeded to make fun of the fact that Allen's comment about the age of the Earth came in the context of a discussion about uranium mining. Olbermann asserted, "The way we can know the Earth is billions of years old is because of the decay of uranium. Carbon dating!"
Sigh.
Someone tell Keith that uranium is only a mediocre dating choice because of its uniformity. It's hard to tell how much uranium a sample started with, therefore it's hard to date. Much better choices are rubidium, potassium, and strontium, all of which have multiple decay products that can be measured in ratio to one another to produce accurate results.
As for "carbon dating," carbon is an entirely different element from uranium, and is used for the dating of recently dead things, as it is only accurate out to about 50,000 years, and is only good for dating organics. (Living things have a regular flow of carbon in and out as they eat and breath; it's only after fossilization that carbon transference stops and we can reliably date the organism's age from the decay of carbon left.).
So Keith is an idiot. He should consult with a geek before he goes off, again, with an idiotic rant of that flavor. Apparently, an MSNBC peer, Ed Schultz, made a similar mistake, claiming that the Earth is only a billion years old. It's about 4.5 billion.
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Date: 2009-07-12 07:37 pm (UTC)