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I did too at first, you’re not alone.

Yep.

Hello traumatic memory I had been successfully repressing.

Thanks, I’m cured.

This sounded like an ominous privacy warning lol!

Yeah CIA likes to overthrow foreign governments, some democratically elected, and destabilize nations. They say they don’t do it anymore but who knows. It’s pretty public knowledge.

Edit: I live in America and it’s like that thing where you can talk shit about your own family.

An article came out last month or sometime relatively recently that basically says blue light filtering doesn’t help jack.

Personally I prefer warm toned light in everything except my computer monitor.

Edit: published study AND summary article. I only read the article but there is a published study associated with it.

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I hate xmas. I hate xmas music because it triggers my working in retail PTSD.

The only music I can tolerate are the Bells and any Tchaikovsky because the Nutcracker slaps.

Awesome photos!

Whoa you were not kidding about that being pink. Holy cow. I mean…the pink grains could potentially be garnet but I’m a little doubtful and unsteady at saying that for sure. They have conchoidal fracture and a vitreous sheen which could easily be quartz, perhaps stained by something else going on in the area (Mn? > Fe).

Those blue green grains are fricken neato, I don’t have a good explanation for them and can’t really get a good look from the photos.

I see a couple of green grains that could be epidote or some other green mineral, and one that looks a little olivine-esque but it’s hard to tell.

It’s one of those things that you poke and prod and rotate and stare at for a while before giving a broad, hand wavy guess.

It would probably be helpful to look up the location and the formation to get a better sense of what to expect.

Either way, those are dope!

Never heard of it but sounds nice! Pink sands can happen for a variety of reasons and I’m not sure exactly what is going on in Crete. I collected some pink sand in the Bahamas that I found interesting and long story short, it was manganese stained fossil coral. It sounds like a similar process is happening in Crete with red stained foraminifera tests (tiny shells). Not sure what the red is in the tests in Crete without digging into it as I only did a cursory search but iron oxide and/or manganese aren’t horrible guesses.

Looks like a cool spot!

Lost to time and crashed hard drives.

But I did find this image of the garnet sand that would be a good example of the bottom middle picture in the post. You can make out the pink, black, and green zones and I think it looks rad.

(I tried the lemmy upload for the photo. If it doesn’t work I don’t know the hip new host since imgur became…imgur so let me know what i should use.)

I always think sand is worth looking at at least once, lol. Get a hand lens (like $10?) and check it out!

Also it’s probably pink not because of garnet but because of the oxidized bedrock. I’ve seen a ton of stuff that looked like that on the shores around the Lake Superior and it was usually some form of basalt, rhyolite, or rare sedimentary interbed. You’d probably see a bunch of smaller reddish pinkish sand grains along with darker gray ones and maybe some milky quartz. But IIRC Canadian Shield stuff is pretty diverse and I recall there being some gnarly meta stuff out there so you might find some glittery mica and garnets.

Uh what? I mean we can get geochemistry and look for trace elements.

Paleontologists will absolutely look for fossils in sand, they do it all the time. I just sent off a bunch of sand and clay for pollen analysis and I’m not sure how they process it but I know it involves dissolving inorganic material in acid sometimes.

Most of the time no one looks at sand in bulk. It’s…you can imagine, a daunting task. Sometimes people (individuals) will look at sand for some diagnostic purposes - usually in my line of work to note the type and abundance of minerals present, or especially the distribution of particle size and clay/silt content. I know other fields will survey things like diatoms and foraminifera for paleontology but also for I think oil exploration because indicator fossils are important but I don’t do that so I’m not really sure I can speak more to it.

A lot of time people look at sand in the field with a hand lens or drag it back to the lab to look at it with a basic microscope. Or slap it in epoxy and make a thin section. Sending it off for geochemistry is…possible but may not be especially illuminating depending on what you’re trying to learn. People can also date the sand using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) to get a date of when the sand was last exposed to sunlight (and thus, deposited) if the sand is in the right age bracket (<150ka ish).

Rarely people get more involved with things like XRD/XRF, SEM, microprobe uh… something else, I’m sure. That’s more of a straight academia realm though.

I went off on a tangent but people slap sand in machines and other things to find out stuff all the time.

Having looked at sand under a microscope for many, many hours: kinda? These images are not just heavily curated but arranged. Yes I’ve had a bunch with random shell fragments and forams SOMETIMES but notice in those images the pieces are carefully spread out?

Most clean sand looks like the bottom right two images but even those are already filtered for interest. I have a bunch of stuff that looks like the bottom middle photo, which is a contentinal glacial sand deposit that is sorted by wave action to have more heavy minerals (pink garnet, black probably magnetite, a splash of green epidote and white qtz splashed in there). It’s usually a thin THIN layer found on some beaches. It’s like a “pretty” sand people know about and not indicative of the vast majority of sand.

Most sand even in a variety of environments is quartz and random lithic (rock) fragments.

I get a little annoyed when these images (usually the top 3) are shared and layman say, “look at how beautiful ALL sand looks! Appreciate the micro world blah blah some inspirational quote.” It’s straight up misinformation but because it’s “just sand” most people don’t care.

I care. Regular sand IS pretty and it’s neat to look at for a little bit. Stop making sand feel bad with unrealistic beauty standards :p.

I don’t have a lot of information about this but in the Before Times I worked with a couple of people who operated a side business of getting groceries and running errands for housebound or elderly people. They didn’t advertise, it was word of mouth, but it is something you could consider.

You could put up flyers and put them in areas that your target demographic hangs out (VFW, senior center, the grocery store bulletin board). Use large, bold font.

The way they handled it required more personal interaction (going over receipts with someone vs. their shopping list) but once they had a few regulars it was a fine business. It didn’t make much but I think they wanted it to be closer to a service than a massive money maker.

Just something to consider if you feel the new apps (which can be a barrier to the elderly) aren’t meeting your needs.

Delicious delicious sugar water

Samesies, every time.

I had a Cat Genie for years and loved it. Like others, they’re a bit of a pain to take apart and clean when you need to.

It also had a draw back of sometimes missing a small piece, washing it, then blowing hot air on it to stink up the whole place.

But overall I was happy with it. The only reason I don’t have one now is my living situation changed and I don’t have room for it (requires water hookup and a drain).

Yes what I mentioned may sound annoying but consider this: we had ours hooked up to a laundry drain and had to do no scooping. Ever. We didn’t even have to flush the toilet. Every once in a while we’d plug in a special cartridge to do a self clean cycle, and once a year we’d take it apart to clean the internal section (but honestly it didn’t need this except once due to hard water buildup).

You don’t have to do anything and it always had washed and clean litter. Every once in a while it got a little stinky but what litterbox doesn’t?!

Seriously, highly recommend.

Look, we all know about the back pain and chair sitting. But now that I’m old and have back pain this pose he’s doing here TOTALLY screams, “My back is fucked, the second this take is over I’m going to lean forward to complete the stretch.”