Secret Agent Stardust

Awesome video displaying phenomenal craftsmanship—posted by one of my favorite Tiktok accounts: Tlingit_Haida

Aani (the land known as Southeast Alaska) has been home to the Tlingit and Haida Peoples since time immemorial

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

“Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery, or how Linen Armor Came to Dominate our Lives.”

While all of this mayhem (both scientifically controlled and free-form) convinced us that our linothorax was ancient-battlefield-ready, we still felt compelled to try a real-life scenario, so Scott donned the armor and Greg shot him. And while we had confidence in our armor, our relief was still considerable when the arrowhead stuck and lodged in the armor’s outer layers, a safe distance away from flesh.

Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor: Unravelling the Linothorax Mystery - Gregory S. Aldrete, Scott Bartell, Alicia Aldrete, 2013. and here's the "they shot a guy" pic, with one of my favourite captions ever

I just remembered that this was a thing that was HILARIOUS in 2006 and apparently that was ten years ago now.

Old people: join with me in remembering how funny we found this on LiveJournal.

Young people: look at this lolrus, it’s so happy, it has a bucket.

Sorry if it’s a little cramped- had to make this all fit in ten photos. Hope you guys like it….. and again…. sorry Andrew

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Okay, so, Labradorite.  Labradorite is complicated and sciencey, as all good rocks are.  I’ll see if I can explain it in a way that makes any sense!  (Once again, I’m not a scientist!  Correct me if I’m wrong!)

Most minerals, when they’re bright and pretty and colorful, look like that because while they were forming some impurities got mixed into them - usually metals like iron, copper, or titanium.  Without any impurities, these rocks would naturally be colorless.  We call these guys allochromatic (other-colored).

Other gemstones are certain colors because those elements are an important part of how they formed.  They’re not impurities that got mixed in, they’re actually part of the gemstone.  Their natural color IS the color you’re seeing.  We call them idiochromatic (inherently colored).

But labradorite doesn’t get its color from either of those things.  Labradorite is special.  It’s part of a third group: psudochromatic (false colored).  These rocks aren’t colorful at all, but they LOOK that way when light passes through them.

See, labradorite is actually just… grey.  From most angles, it looks like this:

You have to look at labradorite from a pretty specific angle to get those flashy colors, so when we cut it into cabochons for jewelry, or just polish up big pieces of it, we’re careful to do so at the most flattering angle, the angle that shows the most schiller, or “those cool glowy colors.”

Why just the one angle?  It’s all about labradorite’s crystal structure, and how it’s formed.

Labradorite is a rock that cooled down really slowly.  Because of that, it’s made of lots of very very thin layers of crystal, stacked on top of each other and all pretty much aligned in the same direction.  These are alternating layers of albite (mostly sodium), and orthoclase (mostly potassium), which solidify at very slightly different temperatures.  Labradorite is a rock that cooled in just the right way for a thin layer of albite to form, then a thin layer of orthoclase, then another thin layer of albite, and so on.

When light hits labradorite at the perfect angle to pass through a bunch of these layers, you get the schiller effect.  Basically, a little bit of the light gets bounced off the first layer and back to your eyes.  The rest of the light passes through to the second layer, and a little bit gets bounced back to your eyes again, and so on.  Every time more light gets sent back to you, it’s a little out of sync, and this makes it look like a different color.

(This is a very simplified way of explaining this.)

If these layers were all perfectly the same size, you’d get a uniform color, like the blue in moonstone.  But in labradorite, these layers might be different widths in different places, so different parts of the stone will reflect back wildly different colors!  We call this effect labradorescence to differentiate it from the uniform colored adularescence found in moonstone and some opals.

Depending on where it’s found in the world, labradorite can reflect all sorts of different colors!

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

This is jacquard fabric:

For much of its existence, the fabric had to painstakingly handwoven due to the complexity of the motifs that characterised jacquard weaves.

In 1804, the Jacquard punch card was patented, which enabled manufacture to be done at a fraction of the speed:

However, the above cards inspired a connection between the mathematic patterning of the jacquard cards and the idea of a precursor to our modern computers, by none other than Ada Lovelace.

There are similar concepts underpinning other forms of needlework/handicrafts - needle lace and bobbin lace is made to pattern sheets that were originally done by hand, before becoming digitised such as in the Leavers Lace machine.

I'm the head of the Outreach Committee at my fiber arts guild (as well as being vice president) and while we ALSO do demonstrations at historical events, my focus has been bringing in the connections between Fiber Arts and STEM subjects, ESPECIALLY at schools!

Last spring, for example, a nearby middle school had a STEM day and invited us, so I went to the school and set up a display of various Fiber Arts tools and materials, all of which I could use, and a prompt by each one explaining how it uses math or relates to science or whatever, with notes/script I had written out for myself to explain how each one is connected. (The pictures I've included are from the same setup at a different event; I'm not putting up pictures with middle schoolers in them and I didn't catch any before/after.) I had:

A display of silk in different forms ("hankies" or unspun stretched out cocoons, handspun yarn from hankies, rough spun yarn from leftovers, beautiful slippery shiny reeled-and-thrown yarn) and a story about how sick silkworms led to research by Agostino Bassi and his very early work on the Germ Theory, who inspired Louis Pasteur, who inspired Joseph Lister (Science, particularly medical science)

An 8-shaft table loom, with a set of simple punch cards showing how a Jacquard loom would work, and how those punch cards inspired Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace and how the more complex punch cards were widely used right up through the 60's and 70's (Technology)

A spinning wheel, with a mark on one side of the large wheel so you can see when it had made a complete circle, a bobbin that spun faster, and a discussion on how gearing ratios change the work you do (Engineering)

A display of knitting projects, with a book on fitting different motifs together; for instance, if you have a motif that repeats every 24 stitches, it would be best if your sweater was a multiple of 24 stitches around. But what if you also have a motif that repeats every 7 stitches and another motif that repeats every 15 stitches? This book gets around that problem by having EVERY motif be 24 stitches, but it still brings up the issue. Also, a pair of socks with a ball of similar yarn next to them, so we can talk about different ways to estimate whether or not you've got the right amount of yarn to make another pair of socks. (Math)

As a bonus, an interactive set of drop spindles attached to already-spun yarn, so the kids could spin them themselves without having to worry about messing up the yarn or dropping the spindles on the floor. The spindles were different weights and sizes, so the kids could see how that affected the length of time the spindles would spin. (more Science - physics this time!)

I didn't even get into the math of warping a loom, which usually takes me a couple of pages of scribbling notes and calculations, multiplying by ends-per-inch, adjusting for percentage of shrinkage and percentage of take-up and how much loom waste to allow, and margins of error, and stuff like that.