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 ...
It looks like I’m going to have to get brutal about the duct tape. It doesn’t want to hold, so when I go to Walmart again, I’ll get some tacks and do what I can to anchor the tape in place. I hope the letter from Dogpatch comes soon. Spending even the beginning of winter here in a place that doesn’t even get the required upkeep is becoming a very unpleasant thought to me.
What about a hammer and nails?
You can get a graphical disk manager in most flavors of Linux that will let you partition disks. I’m not sure why you’d want to, though.
I’d actually like to get some of that epoxy stuff that can plug up holes in chicken wire. When I leave, Chuck would have to replace the vent grate, but it should thank him for the toilet seat, the mold problem, the smokers and Rocky’s Roaches.
Now, I’m taking my silly self down the hall. If you need me, you know how to text!
IIRC, OpenOffice is now LibreOffice, tho I’m not sure how that came to be. In any case, the product development continues, it reads, edits, and writes native MS Office files, and the price is right as rain.
Ubuntu comes with LibreOffice, Firefox, and the Thunderbird email client.
My own dive into Linux... I probably wouldn’t have been so bold if the laptop had been my only one. Since it was not the only available machine, I went ahead. And I WIPED it; no “dual boot” configuration. I wrote the Linux O/S right over the top of everything.
I hope you have a good night!
It’s just what I was reading in the introduction, but I got overloaded on data and had to quit reading. So if I don’t need to, that simplifies the installation.
Then the next question is whether to install it on a weekend when no one is here and the traffic is slow enough to keep me from panicking, or do it on a weekday when help is around in case I get stuck.
Did I tell you I’m not much good at making decisions?
I believe LO and OO are pretty much the same program, by Apache, and yes, the price is right, which is why I use it instead of Word! Free upgrades!
I had Firefox, and it was a disaster. I think I used it six months before I went back to Win 10, and as much as I hate the latter, the former was SO much worse!
So Linux is the next step and when the day comes that I may need a new laptop, I’ll make sure that Linux is the OS.
Thanks! Ditto you!!
I actually liked the Firefox browser better than Chrome and the Win 10 built-in Edge browser. Now Firefox has been hawking “pocket”;
More recently, though, I’ve migrated to Brave; an outgrowth of Chrome that works to keep my privacy private.
I liked Firefox, but it didn’t like the laptop. It slowed things down so badly and so frequently that I had to uninstall it.
I don’t really want Chrome. So Linux is the next thing on the plate.
Such an unusual morning kitteh! Like a little Dreamsicle!
Good morning. I hope you slept well.
I thought I did, shutting the light out at 1900, but I didn’t fall asleep right away. According to the Fitbit, I got four hours and 26 minutes of sleep, and I know that’s wrong. There was a lot of dreaming, so maybe it’s a glitch in the system. If it happens again, I’ll have to contact the Study Moderators.
I’ve been up since before 0300, but I was checking Facebook. *sheesh* I need to check it more often. There were so many comments to wade through! That just takes too much time out of my morning.
Good morning. I slept pretty well. Jake was out, and DP didn’t start thrashing until I was ready to get up anyway.
Nobody else is up yet here. It’s kind of an in-between period of the year, when public schools have opened - although they’ll probably close again - but it’s only August and we still have our beach trip coming up.
Oh, yes, I almost forgot about the beach trip! Is that for Labor Day weekend/week?
I just took the trash out and it reminded me that I need to sort pills. So that’s what I’ll do in just a minute!
The following week: we leave on the 11th.
Ah. Yes. How could I forget. A nephew’s birthday is that day and a grandson’s is the day before.
Maybe I’ll have news by then! If not, I’ll have to reschedule the U-Haul.
I hope you’ll have news by then. Those folks in AR need to get on the stick!
I lost track of the discussion of corgis. Yes, 25 mph. They were bred for cattle herding, of all things.
Yes, they do, because life here is getting to be more depressing by the day. It was depressing when I moved in and saw the dark floors, small bedroom and living room, and it’s gotten more depressing each day.
I’ve tried to make it a “home,” but it has never felt that way. One of the very few places I ever lived that I couldn’t seem to breathe life into. It’s just a stopover.
</rant
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