To be exact, when zircon crystals form, uranium sometimes substitutes for the zirconium, but lead does not. So any lead in the zircons will be the result of uranium decaying to lead. U-235 and U-238 decay to different isotopes of lead, so they can do a crosscheck on the date.
And zirconium is very durable, so there are some crystals around from the early days of Earth.
Or maybe many teeny tiny spots on.
“Usain Bolt holds the world record in the 100 meter speedrun.”
“Remember, your answers to the physics census are confidential; we will not be issuing Pauli exclusion principle citations.”
IANA expert, but I think “indeterminite” in panel #2 is a rare spelling error. I’m more familiar with “indeterminate”.
IANA native speaker, but had the same thought. It looks wrong.
Now, a census of particles. After finding the god particle I wonder whether they will also find the Jesus particle.
It’s an ore of unobtanium.
Only if they find it before it’s deported.
Only if it goes back to where it was created/born first.
“They rounded down to 182.8 instead of rounding up to 182.9 because 182.9 might make the statement incorrect.”
Ooooh! I do this all the time!
The astronomers reckon the asteroid is about 48.28 km wide
About 48.28 km? Ah, 30 miles! The European press does that all the time when quoting US data.
This makes my blood boil, which is much higher than my usual precise 98.6° Fahrenheit.
It happens in reverse too when the U.S. press reports scientific data (which is virtually always in SI units) and converts the units to U.S. customary system units. Like the size of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs being estimated to be about “6 miles” wide. Of course the original estimate was an order of magnitude estimate in SI units: about 10 km.
But at least 10 km and 6 miles both have the same number of significant figures.
Reporting a 30 mile estimate as 48.28 km, on the other hand, implies a false sense of precision. They should report it as about 50 km, of course.
Exactly my peeve.
I’ve seen road signs all over Canada that were obviously “3 miles to …” and were translated to km with word precision.
I see this in the “science” portion of Google News. The Indian Times is often describing a passing asteroid using descriptions like; the size of an aircraft carrier, the size of an Olympic swimming pool, box car, refrigerator, …
And then there’s the Colorado sheriff way of describing size…
Like the museum guard who tells a visitor the dinosaur bones on display are 65,000,003 years old. “My boss said they were 65 million years old, and that was three years ago…”
At the natural history museum where I volunteer we have a gallery for late-Cretaceous Arizona. The sign over the entrance is 68,000,000 BC and I’ve made that joke until people believed me.
Ditto for the geology hall where we have some pieces of the Barringer Crater meteorite on display. On the wall above them is the photo below and I had to stop telling people, “Five milliseconds sooner and it would have wiped out the visitor center.”
