I chose a literal title today.
We went for a walk yesterday, and about 1.52 miles from the house (by road) we stumbled across a more or less intact Nintendo cartridge on the side of the road:
< Duck Hunt
It was Duck Hunt. Muddy and with a crack down one side, it was in otherwise great condition. Especially considering it was likely tossed from a car window in transit. I have a working NES, although I doubt I have a TV I can connect it to. I would bet money this cartridge (which is probably over 20 years old) would work if I plugged it in!
Here's more info on where we found it, just because it gave me an excuse to use Google Earth:
And in completely unrelated news, I bought an amethyst. Yes, an unset cut amethyst gemstone:
It is 8 carat in total (so, ~2 grams in weight), measuring 12x15mm in size. It cost me a whopping $4.00 on ebay. This is because the stone has signficant defects inside it (you can see them in the left photo, look toward the bottom edge). Mostly ‘bubbles’ and interior cracking. The surface however looks great!
I bought it with the intention of heating it to 430 Celcius in our annealing oven in the lab at school, and then irradiating it with high-energy x-rays. The heating would have bleached the colour away from the stone – turning it either transparent or slightly brown or yellow. The irradiation would have returned the purple colour, which would have remained until the stone was heated again.
Thus the amethyst was going to be a ‘show and tell’ for a talk on ‘color centers’ (I apologize for the US spelling just now…) I am giving next week.
However! However, without knowing the true composition it would have been a crapshoot, and since it is possible that I may just end up blackening the stone on heating, and perhaps not having energetic enough x-rays to restore the color centers upon irradiation – and because now I have it I love this little stone – I have decided it will remain intact and be an heirloom for all eternity 🙂