Category: Miscellaneous

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 🙂

If you are reading this, and would like a postcard from Hawaii, and suspect I may not have your current address, then please email me soon.

Yesterday it snowed, which is highly unusual since it was mid April. It was, altogether, a bleak and miserable day. Cold, wet, icy and dark. The seasons on which we depend for everything are at best an unlikely blessing. We’re destroying our planet, slowly but surely, and in time even days like yesterday will be a fond memory.

Yesterday

To distract yourself from the grim future, how about a trip to a grim present. In recent years there has been a strong wave of creepy Japanese horror films. Often they are remade (The Ring, The Grudge) but I assure you they are usually better in the original Japanese. Many of the have the same theme (even plot…), and the following example distills the genre down well into a bite-sized portion.

The film is called Black Hair Woman and is only about twelve minutes long. It is divided into two parts on youtube (in Japanese, with subtitles):

< Part One

< Part Two

I highly recommend this short film. Not only is it quite scary for how short it is (watch it in a dark room with the volume high), but it features the lovely Aya Matsuura (very famous Japanese idol singer) in a starring role.