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Cake day: September 6th, 2025

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  • As Thalfon said, the Carbon 14 decays at a predictable rate.

    So where does the starting quantity come from?

    Radiation from space (probably cosmic rays) interacting with the atmosphere causes some of the atoms to become a different isotope. Plants integrate C14 into their sugars and cellulose, and when they are dead and buried by sediment, no more C14 is integrated. While buried, the plant matter is sheilded from further radiation, the C14 decays at a predictable rate, and we measure that. Meanwhile, underground carbon like coal and oil is also sheilded from radiation and doesn’t get converted to C14; instead any C14 decays into C12. Thus the problem with Carbon dating after the industrial revolution.






  • Here are some tips once you have chosen:

    You can change your desktop environment later.

    If you do your install with seperate partitions for /home and others, leave 10% unallocated. Also make /bin about 15gb and /boot about 1.5gb. When you eventually run out of space, you can use KDE Partition manager to add the unallocated space to the partition you need, even if you set up encryption (gparted doesn’t play well with encryption). You can install Partition manager as a package, you don’t need to use KDE Plasma.

    Using a drive mirror is a good idea. Maybe use it the second time you install.

    If you want to use a cool filesys like zfs, just use btrfs for now (licensing issues). Ext4 will also work for desktop user needs.

    If you go with Debian, you can add repos to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. But it is a one-way trip, so before adding sid, consider running your program in a vm. Non-free non-free-firmware and contrib are fine