Synova

Who'd have thought that "underground" involved so much UP! We climbed about 600 feet, not counting the down and back up parts, to nearly 7000ft at the top.  In between we crawled (part of it was crawling) into the Galena King Mine.  I went on this trip last fall, too, but this time I got better interior pictures of the crystal bands above our heads.  The pretty blue is Fluorite.  I'd been asked by someone to look for Wulfenite and the bright orange *might* be, but it was too far above my head to see for certain.  The only minerals of interest to our class (and to long ago miners) were the Fluorite, Galena, and Barite. looking up... men could stand on those logs, and did. The blue is fluorite, but what is bright orange and pink? Pretty darn good for a phone camera. Inside. Outside, 7000 feet up.  "Nellie Mine" shaft in the middle distance.  They dug up a lot of nothing and left a hole.  Mt. Taylor in the far distan...

I have an Etsy store where I sell jewelry made with natural stones. Here's some of what I have there.

I finally got my orchids all repotted.  Poor neglected things.  It's been too long. Remember my Phals?  This is what they looked like last winter.  This is a good window for them.  It's north facing so I've got a four tube fluorescent shop light above them.  It's really hard to find the sweet spot for sunlight in windows anyway, so this is ideal.  It also gets really chilly next to the glass once it starts getting cold out.  This says "Hey, bloom now!" You can see that they're growing right out of the pots.  My friend gave me this phal because she didn't know what to do with it.  Phalanopsis sometimes grow keikis (babies) on the bloom stem.  These had roots so I just cut them apart.  I considered putting them together in a pot with the parent plant, but changed my mind.  The next three pictures show how badly my phalanopsis needed to be repotted.  After I took this one out of the pot I decided  t...

"Dave Freer is a former Ichthyologist (Fisheries Biologist) who turned author because he heard the spelling requirements were easier. They lied. He is happily married, with two great sons, two lovely daughters-in-law, and now is bracing himself for grandchildren. He and his wife Barbara live on remote Flinders Island, off the coast of Tasmania. He dives, fishes rock climbs, lives a chaotic experiment into self-sufficiency, including making his own bacon, from his own pigs, and writes novels. Some have even blundered onto best-seller lists before being kicked out by respectable literature." (Bio from Amazon.) Dave Freer is one of my pretend internet author friends and exceptionally skilled writer. He recently moved from South Africa to Flinders Island, about as near the back side of beyond it's possible to manage and still be on Earth, and has written this book and is dedicating all proceeds from it to his new little parish church. Many of his books are science fict...

Growth rings in an exposed CaCO3 outcrop. The whole thing looked a bit like a stump. Actively forming rock.  The spikes are about 1cm across. The source of the dissolved CaCO3 is the Madera Formation. Another view of the first rock.  The whole thing was full of funnels or tubes, from these big ones to about 2mm in diameter.

 This is meant to be a wrap-around so imagine it folded in half.   I put my name in the lower block but don't have anything in the back cover block yet.  It's pretty neat, I think.   It's slightly cartoony but  I don't think so much so that it won't work.  The story itself is plenty appropriate for younger readers anyway.

  Guadeloupita Mesa. The orange layers (starting at the bottom) are the Abo Formation, Lower Yeso, a little bit of the remaining Upper Yeso which has been eroded and topped over by the Bandolier Tuff which is all of the buff colored rocks. The other side of Guadeloupita Mesa. Starting at the bottom is the orange Lower Yeso (the Abo doesn't show at all) a complete Upper Yeso which is the fine layers of darker red.  The Glorieta sandstone is the light and dark, relatively chunky layer about half the thickness of the Upper Yeso.   Above the Glorieta sandstone is layer that is eroded and looks like a bit of a slope with vegetation, that's the Moenkopi formation. (I looked up how to spell that.  The last dark sandstone/conglomerate layer is the Chinle Group.  Above that is the Bandolier Tuff.  In between the two pictures is fault displacement of maybe a 100 meters.  On the left everything above the Upper Yeso is gone, eroded away before the mega-vo...

Transcendence is a 2014 movie starring Johnny Depp, who was incredible as always.  Rebecca Hall also did a great job, as did Paul Bettany. I note that on IMDb it lists "Warner Brothers" after "written by".   Frankly, "written by committee" explains a whole heck of a lot. The idea of "transcendence" is relatively standard in science fiction.  In essence the "essence" of humanity is uploaded to the cloud and we leave our physical limitations behind.  Sometimes this is expressed as the "singularity".  I'm not at all fond of this particular sub-genre, though my husband prefers it to other science fiction sub-genres.  He agrees with me about this movie, which he should have loved. The movie opens with the aftermath... there is an implication of a police state, food shortages, and the absence of technology, even refrigeration.  This situation would be utterly horrific and involve the death of millions... or so I would assu...

I caught the last caterpillar in the act of turning into a chrysalis.  (Video in the post the follows this one.)  The last picture is a bunch of the older chrysalises.  About half of those have already hatched.

Nine butterflies so far.  I should have at least this many more before they're all hatched.

I do so appreciate some Larry Correia snark.  I don't think he could fail to be entertaining if he tried.  However, his smack down of NPR " looking to manufacture some outrage"  over the under-representation of Hispanics in film is not precisely *funny* which makes me think that Correia just might be slightly, actually...  annoyed.  "When NPR says that some of the Latin actors aren’t “easily recognizable” that means that they aren’t conforming to accepted liberal suburban Ivy League stereotypes. NPR wants Latinos to play beaners in sombreros, hotel maids, or gang bangers… " When NPR bases their argument on the fact that Jennifer Lopez is not easily recognizable as Hispanic in a movie, you know they've thoroughly jumped the shark.   OTOH, you probably already knew that, seeing as we're talking about NPR here. Larry Correia fisks NPR. Especially mindboggling... the part where NPR complains that Zoe Saldana played the part of a black person in Sta...

No dear, you weren't talking too much about yourself.  You weren't going on and on and boorishly promoting your latest book.  You were, in fact, talking about other people. Loudly. Mockingly. In the foyer.

I'd say, yes, actually. That's with a whole bunch of caveats and recourse to definitions. Still, I think that most of what this guy says is both very right and very wrong.  First, he claims that men = violence is entirely cultural... that it's trained into boys from their youngest years.  Part of that is true, but it's also not true.  We know that higher testosterone is associated with higher aggression in both men and women and men tend to have more testosterone. Violence is actually essentially human. We don't train it into ourselves, we train it OUT.*

There are T-shirts over the seat covers. My dad has had this hot rod since he was a "rebel" in the 50's.  When I was a teenager he started to fix it up again, rebuild from the bottom up.