I did a bunch of small odd jobs around the house today. One was drilling some holes to mount a kitchen gadget on the wall of the kitchen. I’ve been putting this off for a while because I hate drilling into brick – it’s really hard without a hammer drill, and I don’t want to buy a hammer drill for a couple of holes. I took my time, letting the drill bit cool down between roughly 30-second drilling sessions. It eventually made holes deep enough and I screwed the gadget to the wall, clearing off some benchtop space that’s been occupied for several weeks.
I did some ISO Standards work on a photography standard that requires reading and commenting on. I did a bunch of configuration for my photography web shop. I did some prep work for my school science visit on Monday.
I went for a walk and saw some more storm damaged trees. Over by the creek not far away from my place, two enormous trees, about 30-40 metres tall, had fallen over.
These were huge trees, but fortunately they fell in the middle of a park, away from any houses or power lines.
Oh, a snippet of chat conversation I had with friends today:
SI: Can they get any genes from the bones or is that just Jurassic Park nonsense?
Me: No, DNA doesn’t survive that long.
SI: Oh even in the movie it was inside a mosquito in amber or something I think?
Me: Yeah. It’d still decay in there. Google says DNA base pair bonds have a half life of 520 years. So after 1000 years you only have a quarter of the genome left. After roughly a million years you only have a handful of intact bonds left – not enough to work with.
DMc: What if the DNA has been travelling at relativistic speeds though?
Me: Well yes, samples extracted from dinosaurs who travelled at 0.9999c to a distant star and back should be fine.
DMc: Cool, my startup idea is still feasible.
New content today:
If you’re going to send things on relativistic round trips, why limit yourself to DNA? Just send live dinosaurs.