Starship Asterisk*

geckzilla wrote:I've got a high pressure sodium lamp outside my window which I curse on a near nightly basis but I have noticed it plays rather well with this toy. Somehow I got the idea that maybe I could see emission lines through the thing and ended up putting my eyeball right up to the thing and sure enough there were definite intensity peaks. This is just a toy, though, and I can't figure out if it's just an imperfection in the thing or if they're actually what I think they are. I managed to take a photo.

CDs work even better. That's what I use in the classroom, and we can easily see the solar spectrum as well as the distinct lines that show up from sodium and mercury lights, from fluorescent lights, and from monitors and LED projectors.

Some years back I was at a star party and they were handing out little cards with a 1/4" hole containing a transmission grating (you can make one by peeling the metallic coating off a CD). Printed on the card are images of the appearance of all the major light pollution sources as seen through the grating.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... -1954.html wrote:
April 11 of that year has been identified by experts as the most boring of the 20th century – a day when nothing of note happened.
After feeding 300million facts into a new computer search engine they have announced there were no key news events or births and deaths of famous people.
The best the machine could muster for the day was the fact that Belgium had its fourth post-war general election and a Turkish academic who taught electronics was born.

The headline for the article was pretty funny, too:

Here isn't the news: April 11, 1954... the most boring day of the 20th century

Admittedly April 18, 1930 may have been somewhat boring, too. The previously quoted Daily Mail article said:

According to BBC Radio, April 18, 1930, was the dullest day of the 20th century after an announcer informed the nation at the 6.30pm bulletin: ‘There is no news.’

Of course the level of dullness boils down to what you find boring and what you find interesting.

Ann

Here's a day when something happened that seems not to have happened before. Whales surfing the Pipeline on Oahu's North Shore.
Humans surf on top of the waves, whales surf in the waves.

Article and slide show. http://www.wfsb.com/story/25220334/phot ... o-released

Something new... A Zonkey.

http://www.wfsb.com/story/25341749/zonk ... mexico-zoo

I'm very interested in this news about Georesonance finding something very plane-like with what seems to be essentially an imaging study similar to how we study space except that it's looking at Earth instead. I'm not sure how it works since looking through an ocean or through solid rock is different from looking at light through a vacuum but I'm very curious.

geckzilla wrote:I'm very interested in this news about Georesonance finding something very plane-like with what seems to be essentially an imaging study similar to how we study space except that it's looking at Earth instead. I'm not sure how it works since looking through an ocean or through solid rock is different from looking at light through a vacuum but I'm very curious.

Me too.

Beyond wrote:Something new... A Zonkey.

http://www.wfsb.com/story/25341749/zonk ... mexico-zoo

Hey... they zonkey should have been in the "cute" thread, Beyond!

And what about surfing on that whale, using it as a surfboard? I guess it would have been hard to remain standing.

Ann

The Zonkey is just a bit too big for me to see it as cute, Ann. However, IF it seems 'cute' to you, by all means put it in the thread we have been warned about.

Yeah, the whales surf 'in' the wave. Humans surf 'on' the wave. But still, I've never heard of whales surfing with humans in any manner.

I know that there probably isn't a lot of overlap for this sort of stuff at this forum but if you are especially bored you can try to figure out what this thing is. I went fossil hunting when I visited my dad recently and this one caught my attention. There are a lot of crinoids around where I collected it. Fragmented crinoid segments are all I can usually find, actually. If you click the image there is more information in the description there.


Unknown Fossil by geckzilla, on Flickr

Scratch that, maybe it's a scratch circle. I finally managed to use the correct search terms and found some relevant information. (If you search for coral rings you get a lot of jewelry.)
It seems to be one of the things mentioned in this paper. The idea is that a cnidarian polyp was attached here and as it swayed in a current rings formed around the anchor point. That's pretty cool because soft bodies of jellyfish do not create much in the way of fossils. Hmm.
http://earthscience.ucr.edu/docs/Soren_scratch_2002.pdf

This... is a jelly fish fossil?? I wooda guessed it was a fossilized slice of tree, because of the rings. Oh well.

Aw heck... you maybe cudda stumped Art with this, ya think?

Well, possibly, anyway. Anything sticking out of the sediment capable of swaying could leave rings. I wouldn't guess tree because these are shallow ocean fossils.

I'm just a landlubber, so what do I know?

geckzilla wrote:I know that there probably isn't a lot of overlap for this sort of stuff at this forum but if you are especially bored you can try to figure out what this thing is. I went fossil hunting when I visited my dad recently and this one caught my attention. There are a lot of crinoids around where I collected it. Fragmented crinoid segments are all I can usually find, actually.

Are you sure it's a fossil? I can't really tell what the material is, but it doesn't seem much like shale from that one image.

Another possibility would be some sort of concretion- something like this maybe.

I quit. Tooo much weird stuff!!

Chris Peterson wrote:Are you sure it's a fossil? I can't really tell what the material is, but it doesn't seem much like shale from that one image.

Another possibility would be some sort of concretion- something like this maybe.

I think there is a high probability that it is a fossil (pseudofossil?)--an impression made by a living creature. The photo doesn't do it justice but I think you would agree with me if you could rotate it and see that it is a thin structure on top of the local rock (whatever it is, I am failing geology 101, here) and this is in a fossil-rich area. I have also found these in addition to the pieces of crinoids: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnophyllum_wardi

I was surprised to find some similar specimens on page 17 of this paper:
https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bi ... .015op.pdf
The rings appear on the ventral side of some of those corals. It could be an impression from one of those.

I never thought of bears as being rock climbers, till now.

Beyond wrote:
This...
is a jelly fish fossil?? I wooda guessed it was a fossilized slice of tree, because of the rings. Aw heck... you maybe cudda stumped Art with this, ya think?

The (Asterisk-less base stump) of a large Pennsylvanian crinoid stem fossil?

[Or, perhaps, the (Ass-terisk base) of a large Pennsylvanian Trilobite fossil.]

Yogi

Dare I ask? ... But of course! ... Ok, Yogi, how did Oklahoma get involved with a Pennsylvanian crinoid stem fossil??

I did run across that picture as well. I'm not sure what they did with the stem or what part of the animal that is. I expect it to continue through the bottom if it's a place where the crinoid was anchored but there is just nothing there. It is just like a piece of former mud which an impression somehow formed in. I've had more than one person say it looks like wood based on this internet picture but it just does not look like wood at all in real life. The ridges are very finely detailed and it's quite small.

Beyond: It used to be a shallow sea. The land has been crumpled and gone through a lot of history. Check out the Pennsylvanian link in Art's post.

geckzilla wrote:
I did run across that picture as well. I'm not sure what they did with the stem or what part of the animal that is. I expect it to continue through the bottom if it's a place where the crinoid was anchored but there is just nothing there.

There is an indication of 5 fold "starfish" symmetry in the center of your fossil.

My guess is that it is probably most noticeable near the active upper end of the stem and least noticeable near the base.

Hmm, maybe. I wish I had something to make a mold of it because it's hard to see the shape of the thing with all the textures interfering.

Yogi wrote:My guess is that it is probably most noticeable near the active upper end of the stem and least noticeable near the base.

That's because of the ocean currents gently rocking whatever it was, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and bac zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

You ever see a whole street disappear?

http://www.wfsb.com/video?clipId=101177 ... start=true