Posted on 06/11/2021 11:51:04 AM PDT by Red Badger
At 563 carats, the Star of India is the world’s largest gem-quality blue star sapphire, and is approximately 2 billion years old. (Image credit: D. Finnin/Copyright AMNH)
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What does the legendary Star of India — a 563-carat star sapphire the size of a golf ball — have in common with a 35-million-year-old petrified redwood slab; a massive cluster of sword-like crystals that looks like it came from "Game of Thrones;" and a 5-ton (4.5-metric ton) stone pillar that can "sing?"
You can see all of them, along with 5,000 other amazing stones, in the newly renovated Mignone Hall of Gems and Minerals at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, which is reopening after a four-year closure on Saturday (June 12). There, one-of-a-kind precious gems appear alongside odd-looking rocks — some of which date to billions of years ago — that have been uniquely warped and twisted by extreme temperatures and pressures.
Individually and together, these objects tell a story of the diverse geologic processes that shape minerals on Earth's surface and deep inside our planet, beginning when the world was young and continuing to this day, museum representatives told Live Science.
Related: 13 mysterious and cursed gemstones
The Star of India, which formed about a billion years ago, was discovered in Sri Lanka in the 18th century. It is one of the best-known gems in the world, in part because it was famously and brazenly stolen from AMNH in 1964, along with several more of the museum's prized stones, by a pair of thieves named Jack "Murf the Surf" Murphy and Allan Kuhn, Smithsonian reported in 2014, on the heist's 50th anniversary. (The one-of-a-kind sapphire was recovered and went back on display in 1965).
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Pleased the dog is doing better.
Tom the Son arrived and took Vlad driving. They will go to the library and pick up our books.
There’s a closet on this floor with a sign on it that says, “Hot Water Heater.” Isn’t it just like the government to buy and install such a useless piece of equipment. I haven’t seen the cold water heater closet yet. Then again, knowing this city, they probably have a cold water chiller.
It’s an absurd world out there.
My solution is to go to Walmart. I need a new pillow for Jake (or for me, depending on how one looks at it).
Makes me wish I were still in bed.
Good morning. Did you sleep well on your new pillow?
It’s 66° out. A whomping storm came through last night and left us with cold and flash floods. It will be chilly today. What was I saying about the weather still being mild?
I have to sort pills this morning. Yippee.
Pretty well, thanks. Jake was out! The new pillow is pretty good, especially for $3.
I wouldn’t mind a chilly day, but we have hot and humid already.
I need to sort pills, too, but I might not get to it until tomorrow morning.
I have too many pills to take on any one day to put it off without doing it for the whole day. And if I do it for the day, I may as well do it for the week.
It’s time I finished getting dressed, too. Though I don’t know why. I wasn’t going to get dressed, but the temptation to go back to bed was just too great!
I also need to comb my head out and wash my face off.
I think, in the last few days, I’ve given up.
Don’t give up. Sometimes when you’re ready to give up, that’s when things start to get better.
Good morning. Happy Friday Eve!
Nothing coming at you today that a good stretch won’t handle.
Never surrender.
Never surrender.
Never ... squirrel!
Sir Winston Churchill if he were ADHD.
We have squirrels here. Also a lot of young persons milling around not very usefully.
I’ve sent the lyrics for Sunday’s music off to Don Fabio the A/V guy. He wasn’t there last week. Not that I blame him, being as he’s in his 80s.
If he’s not there this Sunday, I’ll make copies of the hymn sheet for the congregation, like in the Old Days.
Old Days, meaning those days when button hooks were used on shoes?
I still haven’t gotten any further than getting dressed and sorting the pills. I think I’ll let Sharon know I won’t be going with her.
Old Days, before we got the tv screens on the wall to show the lyrics. In the truly old days, they had hymn books!
In the hymn book days we also didn’t have microphones for the celebrants. They had to have booming voices that could fill a building. I grew up in that era.
We had little churches with good acoustics.
We still have hymn books, because it’s more fun, ya know? We were at a loss when they were taken from us during Covid. But Deseret Book was very busy printing more and engraving them with family names.
We still have booming voices that fill the building. If one can hear over the organist. It was amazing to me that the congregation knows all of the hymns that are chosen on any given Sunday, and a very lot of them are very new to me. I often have a hard time reading notes, so I depend on the organist for the tenor part, and sometimes, she misses.
They don’t want her playing prelude music on the piano, now (baby grand) because she plays with the top up, and that doesn’t set the mood for reverence of the place and the function. So she has to play at the organ because too many people complained.
She tries, though, bless her heart. She just doesn’t realize that what sounds good to her is painful for others.
Our church was pretty big, and didn’t have the most important acoustic item the really old churches always had - a horizontal slab hanging over the speaker to make sure no sound waves went uselessly toward the rafters.
That is a characteristic of many musicians, along with not realizing that what is audible to them is also audible to other people.
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