Radiometric Dating Assumptions and — Working Retail?
by Cowboy Bob Sorensen
On another weblog, I wrote about riding to a town with Roland Meadows, the fiancé of my prospector friend Stormie Waters. We made friends with Aaron, an employee of a big box store. I went to his town and we met up at an eatery there and we made chin music about our jobs.
The place where he works is quite large and the customer base is not exactly classy folks. Some are, but the majority show disrespect to employees, merchandise, and more. When he discussed retail reshops, I thought of radiometric dating, of all things.
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| Grocery shopping, Pexels / Hobi industri, modified at FotoSketcher |
There are assumptions included in the method that are actually irrational and unscientific:
- To stay with the elements mentioned earlier, nobody knows how much uranium, the parent and lead, the daughter, were present when rocks were formed.
- There was no way that more of either element could be added or removed by contamination in some way.
- The decay rate has to be constant, no speeding up or slowing down.
The Retail stores have terms for things that have been returned or that customers have picked up and then simply stashed somewhere; a toy truck may be found in office supplies or a frozen pizza in sporting goods. Reshops, shopbacks, and other names (those first two are also the names of businesses or something) are used for putting things back on the shelves or having to record waste.
Now I'm going to describe the first part of Aaron's day. You can see how it has similarities to radiometric dating. Also, keep in mind that supervisors sometimes wonder why he is takes too long to do this part of his job.
"There are bins for several departments in a certain holding area. I get three, sometimes four when told to. There are people doing their departments too. Items get put on wheeled stock carts that have a lower, middle, and top shelf. We have a device that usually tells us where exactly an item goes so we can put it back, but sometimes it has bad information and I have to search for where it really belongs."
He tries to group things by department so he can do the reshops more efficiently. Unfortunately, the holding area mixes things up and he gets something that is not "his." Then he has to decide if it is expedient to put the straggler away or return it to the holding area.
Sometimes a manager will pull on his reins and holler, "Whoa! Stop what you're doing, work on this other thing, then come back to doing reshops."
"Things have changed from a year ago. Instead of three bins for my areas, they have overflow bins and I may do five. Also, stuff is thrown into bins that have no relevance to the labeled departments, so I sort things out if my stuff and put them where they belong. Sometimes I'll come in and have almost nothing to do there because the night shift actually did their work. Also, holiday stuff is sometimes in three or four locations. "
He has had other employees add items to his stock cart and he has done the same thing. When putting things where they belong, he often finds more stuff stashed. Those things get put away or taken to the holding area.
"It's uncommon, but I have seen customers take things off my cart so they can buy them. Also uncommon is when other employees start working my cart and putting things away."
Items that are stolen have to have their packaging turned in so they can be declared, others with, say, one out of four ink pens missing can be resealed and discounted. "Theft and wasted food cost retailers mega money annually. Lazy clowns that just drop anything anywhere are making people like me put them back. Then people cry about prices being raised but there are three reasons high prices are caused my customers," Aaron said bitterly.
Another thing that slows him down is the fact of life: customers. He gets stopped and asked where something is located. All part of the job. "Some days are busier than others. Also, I have gotten faster at it."
Do you see what has been happening to compare this aspect of Aaron's job to radiometric dating? A supervisor cannot compare the amount of taken in the past with how long reshops currently take.
- In radiometric dating, nobody knows the original conditions of the rocks. For reshops with Aaron and his crew, the initial workload can be drastically different from day to day. As we have seen, there are many reasons for this.
- Contamination of original elements in the rocks is unknown. Reshops have things added to or taken from the cart.
- The radiometric decay rate is assumed to be constant for uranium to decay into lead in a rock sample. The working crew cannot work at a constant rate due to small and large interruptions, and the working speed of the employees can change.
"Are you still doing reshops?" A supervisor has no way of knowing what went on because that person is doing supervisor stuff.
The link used above (and repeated here) discusses serious flaws in dating methods, and how there are wildly different results depending on the methods used. Never mind how rock of known ages are dated at millions of years old. Are you still trusting radiometric dating?