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Old Age: Upgrading and Carbon Dating |
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Dr. Samuel Says -
Weirdness
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Thursday, 26 June 2008 |
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Counted them up today, and realized I now have four PCs and three Macs
in the main office here at Dyscern World HQ. All are in various stages
of decay and disrepair, and some are quite old indeed. The real
artifact of the collection is a Macintosh 128K, which still works,
barely, and which can still occasionally beat me at Risk.
 It got me thinking about upgrading again. Usually, this process ends with me saying screw it -- out loud, to no one in particular -- then buying a brand new system. But this time I'm committed to thinking it through. Step One: PC or Mac? One interesting item I came across in my research: this breakdown by C/NET UK on the relative expense of upgrading PCs vs. Macs.
I also started trying to figure out the exact ago of these old these old systems I have lying around. Taking my typical two-fisted approach to science, I'm setting up a test bed to augment the carbon dating process for consumer electronics. (I tend to go off on these tangents; plays havoc with the R&D budget, but hey -- not my problem.) If you take the regrettably casual attitude toward science displayed by so many of the young people today, you might be wondering exactly how carbon dating works. Well, as you know, I live to serve. It's a lot like regular dating --dinner and a movie, usually, although keep in mind that you're in the company of a radioactive isotope.
Actually, radiocarbon dating is a technique used by chemists, archaeologists, and geologists to determine the age of an ancient object. Let's take mummies, for instance. Radiocarbon atoms are present in the tissue of all living things. When that living thing becomes a dead thing, it no longer absorbs radiocarbon. Fortunately for our purposes, the remaining radiocarbon, like all radioactive material, decays at a consistent rate -- that is, it breaks down by releasing particles. (Radiocarbon has a half-life of around 5,700 years, meaning that half of it disappears in that length of time.) By measuring existing radiocarbon content in the mummy and comparing it to radiocarbon content in objects whose age is known, scientists can determine the relative age of the mummy.
I'm hoping to tweak the process here into something I call silicon dating. Patent pending, so don't get any ideas, smart guy.
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