Lame-Ass Blog

This is a link that explains carbon dating in, as is indicated by the name of the link i’m sure, a scientific manner.

http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae403.cfm

This is a link that explains carbon dating from a creationist viewpoint as, again, i’m sure you can gather from the name of the link.

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c007.html

The interesting thing to note though, is that much of what the two sites say concerning how carbon dating works is the same.

However, some things jumped out at me while reading the article written by a creationist and i’ve quoted them here:

"People wonder how millions of years could be squeezed into the biblical account of history. Clearly, such huge time periods cannot be fitted into the Bible without compromising what the Bible says…It makes no sense at all if man appeared at the end of billions of years."

     - I think this quote shows the goal of this website.  I thought perhaps they were going to explain
that it is still possible for these to coexist if you take this passage to be figurative rather than
literal.  But when I clicked on the link titled "Six Days? Honestly!",

(http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c011.html)

I found that they actually believe in the literal sense of the creation story.  In other words, that the
world was created in a mere six days and that one can trace the genealogies in the Bible (all those begats) to figure out how old the world is.  There is definitely an agenda behind this.  I doubt very highly that the scientific community has some anti-God agenda.  They just follow the facts.  After all, if an experiment were able to be proven wrong, someone would jump all over it so that they might get the credit for disproving the experiment.

"However, things are not quite so simple. First, plants discriminate against carbon dioxide containing 14C. That is, they take up less than would be expected and so they test older than they really are. Furthermore, different types of plants discriminate differently. This also has to be corrected for.[2]"

     -There’s a lot that’s funny about this paragraph, and i don’t mean funny ha ha.  First the part about plants discriminating against carbon dioxide containing 14C.  Compare that to what the scientific website says:

"Now living plants ‘breathe’ CO2 indiscriminately (they don’t care about isotopes one way or the other), and so (while they are living) they have the same ratio of carbon 14 in them as the atmosphere."

It’s almost as if the creationist website took the scientific quote and took the letters "in" out of the
word "indiscriminately".  These two statements are in direct contrast.  This is a problem obviously.  Who should one believe?  I’m sure you already know who I believe, but consider this.  Take a look at the end of that quote.  There’s a bracketed 2.  That serves as a footnote.  I thought, ok, now I’m going to see where this information came from, or perhaps there will be something clarifying this further.  When you click on the "2" (or scroll down the page to the footnote section) it says, "Today, a stable carbon isotope, 13C, is measured as an indication of the level of discrimination against 14C."  First of all, carbon is stable as carbon 12, not carbon 13.  I’ll let that slide as being a typo, however, this is not the main issue i have with this footnote.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think this footnote really had anything to do with that particular paragraph.  I’m going to venture a guess as to why this footnote is actually there, since it obviously doesn’t serve to clarify anything, nor does it show where they got this "fact".  I would guess that most people who see a footnote don’t look the footnote up, or if they do, they forget what it is they were just reading and are only reminded of it when they read the footnote.  This looks like a misdirection tactic to me.  If you don’t bother looking at the footnote, its mere presence lends the paragraph some authority.  When you see a footnote, you tend to assume that what you just read is quoted from another source, thus lending it some credence.  Obviously, the footnote does nothing of the sort, but even I assumed that’s what the footnote was there for.  However, as you can see, the footnote doesn’t even relate to the paragraph!  This really looks like misdirection to me.  It’s as if they’re trying really hard to make this report look like a scholarly paper by adding footnotes.  Again, the report looks quite scholarly and is lacking any glaring grammatical errors.  I don’t think this is a mistake.  I think this is an intentional device used to make their case look stronger.  And the sad thing is, i bet it usually works.  For me, though, it tore a big gaping hole in their credibility.  That’s why i believe the version explained by the other website.

"Anything over about 50,000 years old, should theoretically have no detectable 14C left. That is why radiocarbon dating cannot give millions of years. In fact, if a sample contains 14C, it is good evidence that it is not millions of years old."

     - I don’t know where they got this figure, but the other website disagrees.  It says, "This technique is best for dating items which died between on the order of 1000 to on the order of 1,000,000 years ago. Carbon 14 dating is not great for dating things like a year old because if much less than 1 half-life has passed, barely any of the carbon 14 has decayed, and it is difficult to measure the difference in rates and know with certainty the time involved. On the other hand, if tons of half-lives have passed, there is almost none of the sample carbon 14 left, and it is really hard to measure accurately how much is left."  The only other thing to say about this quote is that the evidence of carbon 14 in a sample is not necessarily evidence of something NOT being millions of years old.  It is either evidence that scientists lucked out in finding a very large sample size of what they’re testing, or the sample has become contaminated.

To see unbiased science so twisted to fit into someone’s belief system is grotesque.

Most people my age would envy my job. I pretty much like my boss. Days off are always easy to finagle. Scheduling is rigid enough to be predictable, but flexible enough to move people around if need be. I have been working this job for over two years and with each new semester, I am usually in the need of a change in schedule, which is easily accomplished. I get paid $9.50 an hour for little more work than running a register. Being a student, this is an ideal job for me because I am able to get homework done in between transactions. In Gardner, these undertakings occur with less and less frequency after nine p.m., leaving me to do my homework in peace. No job is perfect, however, and this one certainly has its own drawbacks. In my case, the worst part of my job is the customers. Most customers are relatively benign. Oftentimes I already have what they want on the counter before they walk through the doorway. Other times I am rolling my eyes before someone walks through the doorway. Though waiting on customers is pretty much the main thrust behind my job’s existence, there are certain types that make me wish I had a different job. If not for the good parts of the job, they probably would have led me to quit long ago. After years of pushing buttons and counting change, I have come to identify certain types of customers that come into the store throughout a normal day of work. They range from mildly irritating to downright repulsive. Sometimes a visit from the more annoying of customers can ruin my day with all the speed of a sixteen-year-old tearing through the parking lot in his ridiculous looking Honda Civic. The most common categories of customers are as follows:

Compulsivus Gambliticus

Whoever created the scratch ticket is a genius. I would like to meet this person so that I might have the opportunity to shake his hand and then rip his arm out of its socket and beat him with it. Apparently, some people cannot afford the fuel to take a trip down to Foxwoods. Instead, they come into my store to scratch tickets. One can easily recognize this category of clientele by their grey fingertips. Years of attempting to hit it big have left them without even a penny to scratch their tickets with and have thus resorted to using their fingernails. This leaves behind a rather attractive silver coating upon their fingers. For eons, metallurgists had tried to turn lead into gold before realizing that such an endeavor is impossible. This group of citizens, on the other hand, has succeeded in turning their hard earned paychecks, their gold, into a leaden color adorning their appendages. As with any species, there are variations of this animal. Some gamblers will come in for a few tickets and leave. These people will scratch their tickets at home and come back the next day if they win. Others will spend a set amount of money and play till they either win a large prize or lose what they put in. Neither of these groups are particularly annoying. The most vexatious characters will spend an entire night (or paycheck, depending on which comes first) scratching tickets and commenting on their lack of luck. I once sold three whole books of ten-dollar tickets to one person. Each book contains a hundred tickets. In other words, he bought three thousand dollars worth of tickets from me over the course of my shift. I don’t know how much he won, but I do know that it wasn’t enough to cover the cost of his addiction.

Penniae Pincherus

Some people say that a penny saved is a penny earned. There are others that believe that a penny stolen is a penny earned. Most convenience stores have a penny tray in case someone needs a penny to make enough change. Some people use this courtesy to their own advantage. One customer comes in nearly every day and takes four pennies out of the dish to make enough change to buy his cigarettes. His total comes to $4.19. He reliably brings in $4.15 and takes four pennies out of the tray to make up the rest of the total. He is often reaching for the four pennies before I have so much as placed his cigarettes on the counter. Though this is somewhat annoying, it is hardly the worst I’ve seen. One customer in particular has driven me to do particularly childish things. This gentleman will pump his gas and go over by a couple cents. I have not once seen him arrive at an even dollar amount which led me to believe that he does so purposefully. After quite a few incidents of his rushing into the station and grabbing pennies out of the tray, I decided to do something that I am not particularly proud of, but that I knew needed doing. His total flashed onto the screen: $15.02. I quickly emptied the change tray of its contents. When he came in and reached for some pennies, he looked in bewilderment at an empty tray.

"No pennies?" he asked, incredulously.

I glanced down and told him that I guess someone used them all. He reached into his pocket. I looked down and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He proceeded to pull a handful of change from his pocket. It appears he just liked to get an extra two cents of gas for free.

Hearnoseenospeaktono CashieriusSome people have an uncanny ability to make others feel less than human. I’m not exactly an extrovert, but I make sure that I greet everyone that comes into the store with at least a pleasant hello. Some people make no acknowledgment of my presence at any time during their stop in the store. Usually, they see me as nothing more than an instrument through which their material needs are met.

"Hello," I say as they come to the counter.

"Pack of Marlboros."

"Four eighty-two, please," I say as he fishes out some crumpled bills from his pocket. "Thanks. Have a good one," I try in a final attempt to elicit a response. The chime attached to the door jingles as he leaves. This is perhaps the most depressing part of my job. I obviously mean so little to these people that I don’t even require the effort it takes to engage in verbal communication.

Much of the time I spend at work is spent sitting down doing homework. Sometimes though I have to do a little work. Unfortunately, this work inevitably involves putting up with the irritating idiosyncrasies of many customers. Randal put it best in the movie Clerks. He said, "This job would be great if it weren’t for the fucking customers."

My dad has finally had some luck roll his way.  The other day he went to the music store to get some mic cables and happened to run into this guy that used to own the other (now-defunct) music store in Gardner.  We used to stop by there every once in a while and shoot the breeze.  Even when he sold the store, I would still bring him whatever little business I could, fixing my occasional bass mishaps.  Anyway, my dad was telling him about the band that he and I are in together (Tread Water) and then he says that he quit his own band and is looking for a new band.  I couldn’t believe it.  This guy is a serious player and could easily blow the rest of us out of the water with his musicianship.  And here he is asking if we need another guitar player.  My dad played politician and said that he’d ask the rest of the band what they thought and he’d call him back.  So they both said yes and I of course said yes so now we’re having an "audition" on Wednesday.  What a ridiculous arrangement.  We should just tell him he’s in the band and we’ll be practicing on Wednesday.  As far as my dad and I are concerned, he’s in.  Not only is he wicked good, but he has contacts and has been in the business and in the area for pretty much his whole life. 

Needless to say I am pretty psyched about this Wednesday.  A good time should be had.

That all said and done…

I am a bit disappointed as far as my music right now.  I have been playing with this band for a while and it’s ok.  I think we have the potential to play some gigs and make some money, but right now it’s a little tiresome.  It would certainly be easier to endure if we were in fact gigging at the moment, but that’s not the problem really.  What I am yearning for is some excitement.  Our set list consists of almost nothing but covers.  We have maybe two originals, but that’s it.  I am yearning for that burn that comes when you are creating something incredible.  It’s beautiful how everything just seems to fall into place.  I am attracted to music because of the creative aspect.  While I try to spice up the parts for the cover songs we play, it’s just never quite the same as creating something from scratch.  Covers is to originals as masturbation is to sex.  Though the same general motions are happening, it is nowhere near the same act. 

I remember the days when I would hang out with Pete (Serendipity singer(?)/guitarist) and write Serendipity songs, often while incredibly inebriated.  There were songs that we wrote when I no longer felt a seperation between my hands and the neck of my bass.  However, there were also times when this led to me no longer feeling a seperation between my hands and the rim of the toilet bowl, but that’s another story. 

There are times when I can create.  I still write songs with Vinny (Administration guitarist) and that often yields results that are impressive.  However, it will never add up to what is produced when we add Mulqueen (Administration drummer) into the mix.  And there will never be a feeling that can match what I felt when we played West at a show and had three people surrounding each mic screaming all the words.  To just step back and see the crowd knowing every word and going nuts at the first sign that the songs is being played…wow. 

Unfortunately, those days seem to be at the very least on hold.  Mrs. Mulqueen, if you are reading this, cut the bullshit.  Let your son experience this joy.  Let him know what so few people know in this world.  Even if it’s for just a few hours, we get to experience bliss.

Since you aren’t reading this though, I’ll just tell you to take your head out of your ass and to stop being such a big vagina.

I’ve probably stated this before in previous blogs, but I’m actually going to keep up on this thing or else. I suppose it’s probably a good sign that I haven’t thus been able to keep on top of anything (at least as far as blogs go) because that means I actually have a life. I fully expect to have no life whatsoever shortly and hopefully that means more posts. I also fully expect to tire of it or just simply forget about it once again.

C’est la vie.

For now, bed is calling, and I am ready to answer.