https://amazinggrace1980.blogspot.com/

Paper Kaleidoscope

https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/kzaxmz/70s-scifi-mockumentary-politics-punishment-park

3D Hand

Detail of Upper Half of Disillusion by Francesco Queirolo

An Italian late 19th century carved white marble sculpture of a young girl

Depicted standing by a tree stump, wearing a heart necklace and loose dress, on a circular base signed to the top Q.lio Corbellini/ Milano, 25cm wide, 43cm deep, 97cm high (9.5in wide, 16.5in deep, 38in high).

Lot 209

AN ITALIAN LATE 19TH CENTURY CARVED WHITE MARBLE SCULPTURE OF A YOUNG GIRL

by Quintilio Corbellini, Milano

£10,000 - 15,000
US$ 13,000 - 20,000

620

https://twitter.com/FRANKTRIGG

Planetary nebula are the remains of a star that didn't quite supernova. The star blew off its outer layers of gas into space as its core collapsed into a white dwarf. It contains hydrogen, helium, oxygen, sulfur, and other heavy elements but nothing much past carbon. These stars were not massive enough to produce anything heavier. The different shapes of the nebula could come from a number of factors. It is believed that some may be caused by large planets, brown dwarfs, or stars shaping the star's explosion through gravity. Magnetic fields and rotation rates of the stars may also provide some disturbance of the star to create the interesting shapes.

http://web.utah.edu/astro/nebula.html

Witch Head

Carina

Ring

Hand

Rosette

Ghost

Trifid

A police officer told today how a shark guided him to a rescue boat after he had drifted helplessly in the Pacific Ocean for 15 weeks. Mr Toakai Teitoi’s brother-in-law had perished from dehydration and the 41-year-old policeman knew it was only a matter of time before he, too, succumbed to the elements.

But he said today that two unexpected events led to his eventual rescue – a tropical downpour that provided him with drinking water and the extraordinary encounter with the shark. ‘Just as I was giving up all hope of being rescued after one boat had passed me by in the distance something very strange happened,’ Mr Teitoi said after being brought ashore in the Marshall Islands by the fishing boat which found him.

‘I was cowering from the sun under a piece of cloth I had stretched across the front of the boat when I felt a big bump, followed by some scratching. ‘I looked over the side and saw a six-foot shark circling my boat, but it was mainly bumping against the hull. ‘It definitely caught my attention because I had been fast asleep. Then, because I was now awake, I looked around me and saw the stern of a ship.

‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. I could just make out the crew who were looking at me through binoculars. ‘Of course I was able to wave frantically at them and they came and picked me up. If that shark hadn’t nudged me awake the crew of the boat might have thought I wasn’t in trouble and might have carried on sailing past me.’

Mr Teitoi told his extraordinary story after being treated for exhaustion and dehydration in Majuro in the Marshall Islands. He and his brother-in-law had flown from their home on the island of Maiana to the Kiribati capital of Tarawa so that Mr Teitoi could be sworn in as a policeman. By a curious coincidence, following the swearing-in ceremony, he watched a film depicting a true story about four men from Kiribati who had been lost at sea, with only two surviving after they were washed ashore in American Samoa six weeks later.

When it was time for Mr Teito and his brother-in-law, Ielu Falaile, 52, to return to their home they boarded a 15ft wooden boat for what should have been a two hour voyage. They stopped to fish along the way and then dozed off – and when they awoke they found they had drifted out of sight of Maiana. Soon afterwards, they ran out of fuel.

‘We had plenty of food and we could catch fish, but the problem was there was nothing to drink,’ said Mr Teito. As the two men began to suffer from dehydration, Mr Teitoi turned to prayer, but his brother-in-law just lay in the boat. After five weeks adrift, Mr Falaile died. 'I left him there overnight and slept next to him, like at a funeral,' said Mr Teitoi. In the morning, he lowered the body of his brother-in-law over the side.

Just 24 hours later, life-giving rains fell during a storm – rains that fell for several days – and Mr Teito was able to fill two five gallon containers of water. 'There were two choices in my mind at the time. Either someone would find me or I would follow my brother-in-law in death. I was running out of water. It was out of my control,' he said.

He prayed every morning and several weeks later he caught sight of a fishing boat, but the crew failed to see him. So he continued praying, drinking water and eating raw fish he was able to catch, doing his best to keep out of the tropical sun by sleeping under the cloth awning he had erected.

Weeks went by – and then came that bump. The bump of a shark which woke him and alerted him to a boat that was close enough to see his frantic waving for help. Shortly before leaving Majuro today, Mr Teitoi said: ‘I’m flying home. I’ll never go by boat again.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2204396/Man-saved-shark-15-weeks-adrift-Pacific-Ocean.html#ixzz51aE3R3L9
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" Be a gift to everyone who enters your life, and to everyone whose life you enter. Be careful not to enter another’s life if you cannot be a gift. (You can always be a gift, because you always are the gift —yet sometimes you don’t let yourself know that.) When someone enters your life unexpectedly, look for the gift that person has come to receive from you. "

Dahlia Flower

Quartz

Quartz is a very common mineral, a chemical compound of silicon and oxygen, silicon dioxide SiO2, commonly called silica. If pure, quartz is a colorless, transparent, and very hard crystalline material of glass-like look. The well-known rock crystals - six-sided prisms with a six-sided pyramid at their ends - are simply well formed crystals of quartz.

Quartz appears in a number of colored varieties, like amethyst (violet), citrine (yellow), or smoky quartz (gray, brown to black). It also occurs in dense forms with no visible crystals, like the multi-colored agate and the gray flint.

Quartz is an important rock-forming mineral, being a constituent of many common rocks, like granite. The word "Quarz" (the "t" is missing on purpose) is known from European literature on mining dating back to the 14th century. It is probably of German or Slavic origin.

Quartz Varieties

Quartz occurs in a great number of varieties that differ in form and color. It occurs as massive aggregates, dense nodules, or crystals in druses. Quartz is colorless if pure, but may assume any color due to inclusions of other minerals or built-in trace elements.

The more common of the varieties have been given their own names - on these web pages about 25 different varieties are distinguished. The different forms of quartz are usually classified in 2 big groups:

• Macro-crystalline varieties are those that form crystals, like amethyst, or have a macroscopical crystalline structure. When people talk about "quartz", they usually think of macro-crystalline quartz.

  . Rock Crystal	. Citrine	. Prase	. Rose Quartz
  Smoky Quartz	Pink Quartz	Ametrine	Ferruginous Quartz
  Amethyst	Prasiolite	Milky Quartz	Tiger's Eye
  Aventurine .	Cat's Eye .	Blue Quartz .	Hawk's Eye .

• Crypto-crystalline or microcrystalline varieties that do not show any visible crystals and have a dense structure, like agate. Cryptocrystalline varieties are sometimes grouped together under the term chalcedony.

  . Chalcedony	. Agate	. Carnelian	. Heliotrope
  Flint	Plasma	Chrysoprase	Chert
  Jasper	Sard	Onyx

If you know what tiger's eye and aventurine look like, you might be confused to find them among macro-crystalline varieties. To understand the difference between the two groups it is best to look at the way the different varieties form in nature.

In addition to these varieties sometimes form varieties or growth forms are distinguished. These are defined by their general shape and are given names that reflect their resemblance with another object, like scepter quartz, artichoke quartz or needle quartz. Note that these categories are only used for macro-crystalline varieties. If you're looking for a specific variety and don't find it among the links in the left menu, check the Table of Synonyms to see if it is just a synonym of some variety.

Occurrence

Quartz is very abundant. It can be found in many different geological environments, and its visual appearance reflects the various conditions under which it was formed. Large parts of the earth's surface are literally covered with quartz - sand left over from the weathering of rocks, due to its great physical and chemical resistance. Along with calcite, quartz is one of the few minerals that form rocks made up almost entirely of them: quarzites and sandstones. The greatest amounts are hidden in granites and related rocks, though, which contain about 5-50% quartz. The earth's crust as a whole contains about 12% quartz, most of it in continental crust. The earth's mantle and core are completely void of quartz, and very likely the upper mantle does not contain any free silica at all.

Use

Colored quartz varieties have been used for jewelery for ages, but most quartz is used as a component of concrete: quartz sand and quartz gravel. Pure quartz is needed for producing glass, ceramics, and chemical apparatus. Quartz glass, also known as "fused quartz" or "fused silica" (produced by quickly cooling molten quartz) has a number of interesting properties: its thermal expansion coefficient is very low, it is transparent for ultraviolet light, it is chemically almost inert, and it can form very thin but strong threads used in physical instruments.

A well known application of quartz is its use as an oscillator in electric circuits in watches and computers. Less well known is, for example, its use as a membrane in ultrasonic devices. Quartz is of course the major "ore" of silicon, used in the integrated circuits ("chips") of your computer.

Last but not least, the on-going New Age movement and its associated esoteric culture has (re-)discovered quartz, and probably most of the quartz web pages in the Internet are related to the marketing of rock crystals and other quartz varieties for esoteric purposes. Because of its technical importance, its abundance, and its role in geologic processes, quartz is probably the best-studied of all minerals. But still not everything about it is understood.


http://www.quartzpage.de/intro.html