A Perfect Evening

So I'm sitting in my living room watching Ken Burns' second episode on the National Parks and the telephone rings. The voice on the other end is filled with excitement. It's my retired buddy Jerry calling from Colorado to tell me where he has collected samples for me. There's sand from a parkinglot in Kansas, and from inside dinosaur foot prints in Colorado. He is driving from Massachusetts out to Monument Valley collecting sand from approved places along the way. See you when you get back Big Guy. I'll make a special page of your trip!

Clear Skies, Safe Journey,

Charlie

The Wara Formation

I just posted my most unusual sand sample. It was given to me by a person I had as a student teacher MANY years ago. We went to the same college, UMass Boston, took the same courses, and had the same profs. He was a great teacher, and really wanted to be one, but there weren't any jobs. In fact, people were losing their jobs because of a new tax restructuring program called "2 1/2" where taxes could not be raised more than that percentage each year. As a result, jobs were lost. He answered an ad in the Boston Globe from a Texas oil company. He responded, got the job, and discovered it was in Saudi Arabia! He was 22, so he decided to give it a try. You lived for four weeks at the drill site, then they gave you the price of a first class round trip ticket home for two weeks. He never went home! Instead, he traveled the world on the cheap! Everytime he came home, which was rare, he laways brought me sand samples from where he had been. The strangest was from the drill site. This was sand that was created by the drill at 2,000 ft down! He also brought me back a section of a drill core. He stayed in Saudi for two two-year tours, then he was allowed to pick his spot anyplace else in the world. I lost track of him, so I don't know where he went. I shared this story with my students for probably close to 30 years.

Clear Skies,

Charlie

The "X" Factor

Okay, I think I've figured out what the 1 - 5X on the macro lens actually represent in magnifications, but I could be wrong. I took a picture of one of the samples that had an obvious object (a lump of white, organic material) in it. I placed the white object as close to the center as I could using the grid on the viewfinder and took a "gross" image. Then I switched to the macro and took a 1X - 5X series of images placing the organic material at the center. Then I looked at each of the images in GIMP and measured the length of the white object in pixels and calculated the magnitude of the change in pixels as the magnification. I hope that's right. If you go to the "Photography" page you can see all of the images with a spiffy red border around the edge to show the actual coverage of 1X-5X.

Clear Skies,

Charlie

Maui and New Brunswick are Done!

I finally finished all of the samples for those two places. The librarian also brought me 20+ pounds of sand! I have most of it cleaned and labeled. This week is Maine. I have a sample from Wells Beach, so that will go up almost immediately. Hopefully I'll get some images and a story from the nice folks. I'm taking a course on Systems Science via Montana State. One of the participants is from Alaska, and she lives right on a delta. Hopefully she'll send me some silt!

Clear Skies,

Charlie

Maui and New Brunswick

I'm just a tad overwhelmed! I went into my old high school today to pick up the sand samples from our librarian from Maui and New Brunswick. She calls me into her office and produces two incredible posters on posterboard! There's a map on each poster, and zip lock bags of sand are arranged around the maps. Then there also are zip lock bags containing what I first thought were images showing the signs leading to each beach, but NO they are entire SETS of images from each beach! Then she gives me the real surprise - a 20-pound trashbag filled with class sized samples of sand from each of the different beaches! We're talking eleven beaches in all - three in Maui, and eight in New Brunswick! This is great! Thank you so much Kathy!

Massachusetts is Done!

And I think it looks great! I had to enter the names of the locations in 8 point font to include the latitude and longitude and have the thumbnails show up the way I wanted, but I think that's important. The thumbnails now show as a continuous column, before there was a break. I also received two samples from Canada, and added them to the list. Prince Edward Island must be such a beautiful place! The sand is the deepest red. I was also sent a few rock samples. Maybe I'll add images of them to the page. The librarian at my old high school tells me that she has sand from Maui and New Brunswick for me. She gets around. I was going to pick it up today, but I actually got a call to sub. Maybe tomorrow.

My Virtual Trip to the Cape

Wednesdays are breakfast days for retired teachers in my town. As many as possible from my middle school gather at one of two diners on alternate weeks. One of our members was thrilled with the sand project, and asked if I wanted sand from Budapest. Of course I want sand from Budapest! Her daughter is going there next week. One of our other members is leaving on a cross-country (almost) trip, and brought 25 centrifuge tubes with him for collecting samples. Since Massachusetts was the first state to send sand, I decided to go through my collection and do Massachusetts. Almost all of the samples that my students have brought in are from Cape Cod. So yesterday I got to take a trip to the Cape, and added a number of samples to the Massachusetts map. The map looks great in Internet Explorer. When you click on the little image to bring up the 3X image, they look best in Phoenix. Firefox is a real problem. The large images break down. I still haven't solved the problem of showing the essays in Phoenix or Firefox. The text is lost in the table format I'm using.

I also heard from a teacher from New Mexico today, who is going to send some samples. That's great!

Clear Skies,

Charlie

First Day of School

Everyone warned me about yesterday. Apparently the first day that everyone goes back and you don't is tough. It wasn't! Two of my friends and I went for an early morning walk on Long Beach in Plymouth, Massachusetts. We hit it just at low tide, and it was spectacular. I had a retired earth science teacher, and a life science person who is "between jobs" with me. Long Beach really lives up to its name. The beach is huge. It was also empty! As we walked I gave a running geology lesson, and received a life science lesson. I brought back samples of bryozans on kelp that looked incredible when photographed at 3X. I also decided to create a features page for the website, highlighting different features found in sand. So, if you go to "Massachusetts" there's a new dot for Long Beach in Plymouth, and there also is a "Sand Features" page with one of the strangest rills I've ever seen.

I am Ready!

It's been a while, but I finally sent out a general e-mail message to NSTA General, MSS and Middletalk advertising the experiment. People immediately e-mailed back asking where to send the sand. This was not good! The site told them where to send it! I went into the site using Phoenix and saw the problem. Anything enclosed in a table lost all of its text. The problem - all of my pages are enclosed in tables! So my once beautiful site now looks crude. Hopefully we can fix that. I also bought a great copy stand from a friend to use to take the 3X images. At 3X the depth of field is < a mm! Therefore everything must be perfect so that no section of the image becomes a blur. Only time will tell if I've solved this problem.