Well, as you may or may not have heard, It’s been snowing a little bit off and on here in Seattle over the past day or two. Unfortunately not enough for a snow day, but I enjoy what I can from the snow none-the-less.
It also gave me a chance to test out the camera on my new phone I got for my birthday over winter break. (Yes, I know, that was like… forever ago. Big deal.) So, I took a picture of the snow out the window. Please forgive the glare.
So that is fun.
I’ve also been highly enjoying my Minerals and Gems class. We’ve been talking about all sorts of cool rocks, and have had the chance to play with some absolutely stunning samples. Unfortunately, the camera doesn’t do so well close up I’ve found, and the pictures don’t do any justice to these samples, but here they are anyway.
This is a chunk of Pyrite (Fool’s Gold). You can see that the larger chunk is in a cube form. This is caused by the fact that the crystal structure of Pyrite also happens to be cubic. (Cubes can only be formed by cubic structures, however, cubic structures can form other shapes.) You can also see that a second cube of Pyrite is growing inside the first one, and has begun to protrude! This is something that someone dug out of the ground somewhere! To have it in a perfect cube shape, and then have another cube growing out of it! It’s extraordinarily hard to believe that this is naturally occurring!
This is another sample of Pyrite, but this has two smaller cubes growing out of each other. Again, this is a natural sample dug up somewhere!
As labeled, this is a chunk of rock containing some Azurite (the blue stuff), and some Malachite (the green stuff). It’s kinda hard to tell in the fuzzy picture, but all those little bits are all tiny crystals of each color. Another natural sample, but I assume this one was on the inside of something and it was busted open.
Here’s another picture of the same stuff just in a different environment. Malachite and Azurite like to grow inwards to fill voids. You can see here where the surrounding rock had cracks and open space in it, and the two grew inwards from the walls to fill the space. This one is a natural sample, however it was cut, and polished. So you wouldn’t see it in the wild like this, but it does give us a better look at it’s growing habits.
Anyways, that’s it that’s actually relating to my post title. In other news, I finally got those relays ordered for my Binary Addition Machine. Hopefully they should be here by the end of the week. I suppose we’ll have to see. I’m planning on taking my time with this project and making it nice, so it will take a while. However, I will be photo-documenting the whole process, so it should come out to be a nice progression of pictures when I’m done.
That’s all. Nigel Out.