Gleanings of the Week Ending August 27, 2016

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Dome of Thomas Jefferson Memorial Not As Gleaming As It Once Was – Biofilm is making the dome darken…and it is hard to treat without damaging the marble of the monument.

The Giant Pyramid Hidden Inside a Mountain – It’s in Cholula (Mexico) and the largest pyramid on the planet (base is 4x larger that the Great Pyramid at Giza and nearly twice the volume).

Longest-lived vertebrate is Greenland Shark: Lifespan at least 400 years – The specimens studied were caught as by-catch. I wondered how big the population is and if the by-catch is actually having an impact on the species; no info on that from the article.

365 pounds of Anacostia Park Goose Breast Going to Afterschool Lunch Program – I wonder if geese from nearby areas has filled in the void at Anacostia Park. Our area has a lot of resident Canadian Geese.

SpaceDrafts Vids! – My daughter is part of the group that finds speakers for the Space Drafts monthly events in Tucson…and they’ve made videos of the latest talks available. Most of the speakers are from University of Arizona, Lunar and Planetary Lab.

Invasive Species Spotlight: Devil’s Tail – Another name for mile-a-minute…a very common invasive plant in Maryland. This blog post gives some history of the plant.

How it feels to live in darkness – Dialog in the Dark exhibit in the Children’s Museum in Holon, Israel gives sighted people a 90-minute tour of what it is like to be a blind person.

Let there be LED: The future of light-based technologies for interiors – Anything that gets closer to natural light (for during the day) and can be tuned to not inhibit melatonin production at night would be what the kind of lighting I would want in my house.

Transparent wood windows are cooler than glass: Study –  I would like to have skylights made of this kind of material.

The Killer Flood Made of Molasses – In 1919, a tank holding 2.3 million gallons of molasses collapsed created a 20-feet-high wave of molasses. It flattened buildings and picked up people. 21 people died, 150 were injured.

Washington DC in the Early 1980s

We moved to the Washington DC area in summer of 1983. I recently scanned the slides from those first few years and thought I’d post them on the 4th of July since there are so many celebrations of our national history in the city. We made a house hunting trip in March 1983 and took time out to do a little sightseeing. The best pictures are of the capitol,

The National Gallery of Art,

And the Supreme Court building.

Thirteen months later (April 1984), my parents came for a visit. My favorite pictures from that visit are of the Lincoln Memorial

And the Einstein statue (with my mother in the picture holding a deciduous magnolia blossom that she picked up from the ground nearby).

In August 1984, we evidently made the trek into the city at night. The pictures my husband took of the monuments were quite good: The Lincoln Memorial,

The Washington Monument, and

The White House.

 

 

And then from the top of the Washington Monument: The White House,

The Jefferson Memorial, and

The Capitol.

I know that we made the effort to see the fireworks from The (Smithsonian) Mall at least twice during the subsequent years of the 1980s but I haven’t found any slides from those visits. I’ll save them for the next 4th of July!