Topic: Exposing PseudoAstronomy Podcast #77: 2012 Back-Peddling

[astrostu]

Episode 39, slightly delayed, is now up.  W00t!  It's back to the normal format.  Next up: Crater-age dating.  I'll try to make it more interesting than it sounds ...

[quirk3k]

Yeah! Listening to it now.

[Belgarath]

woot.  Thanks Stuart.

[astrostu]

I have an open question for you all: Is the "Puzzler" worth doing? There's been a marked lack of participation, and none for the last one. They are usually fairly difficult to come up with, but I wanted to do them initially to increase the whole "active participation" side of podcasts between me and listeners. I can't really do it, though, if no one participates. If you haven't participated, I'm curious as to why.

[Chew]

I have an open question for you all: Is the "Puzzler" worth doing? There's been a marked lack of participation, and none for the last one.

Sorry. I was on a 10 day camping trip. :-) Lemme catch up.

But let me add how disappointed I am in the slackers on this forum for not picking up the slack.

[astrostu]

But let me add how disappointed I am in the slackers on this forum for not picking up the slack.

I was afraid you died or something .  But yeah, not gonna comment on the above .

[Chew]

Episode 39, slightly delayed, is now up.  W00t!  It's back to the normal format.  Next up: Crater-age dating.  I'll try to make it more interesting than it sounds ...

I have actually seen a YEC write 'how could we know the half-life of an element with a half-life of a billion years when we haven't been around for a billion years'.

For an example of what you discussed on the podcast of how half-life is calculated from decay rate, ⁴⁰K has a half-life of 1.25 billion years yet a gram of it will undergo 31 decays per second. That is easily measured.

Crater-aging sounds fascinating. Can that be done with remote sensing or do you need boots on ground?

[seaotter]

This is the first question kids ask every time I bring up radiometric dating.

[astrostu]

Crater-aging sounds fascinating. Can that be done with remote sensing or do you need boots on ground?

It's my day job.

[Chew]

Dangit, I knew that. Stoopid brain farts.

[astrostu]

Dangit, I knew that. Stoopid brain farts.

'sok   I've mentioned it a few times, though really mainly in context of the exploding planet stuff.  And episode 1, I think.

[astrostu]

Episode 40 is now posted.  It's everything you never wanted to know about how it's done.

[Belgarath]

Cool, except not cool.  Now I have to go to the later movie so I can listen to this.

[Chew]

"ee-o" if you're European or Carl Sagan.

[Chew]

Puzzler: impact crater sizes increase with increasing mass and since asteroids are more likely to be denser than comets they will more likely make bigger craters.

If so few people participate in the puzzler then I would suggest killing it. I doubt it would adversely affect listenership.