weird glass

While looking for an explanation of "orange manganese" glass, finally found what looks like a technical explanation of "saphiret glass" in a late 19th-century glassmakers' manual. here: in a way, it's the gold-based analogue to the confusingly named copper-based "goldstone". Both are the result of reducing the chromophore ions in the glass melt: in the case of copper, the metal precipitates out into visible crystals; in the case of gold (usually added at a much lower proportion), the precipitate forms a translucent colloidal haze that (as the source says) reflects light as pale brown but transmits it as sapphire-blue. ( Read more... )

book meme

Yeah, I know I already did this one or something like it a while back. Nevertheless, newly absorbed from scriva:

Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

"Note the wall-to-floor curvature, an asymptotic function of material accumulation in inverse ratio to decreasing surface area of actual tatami."

It's actually from page 57, which bears the captions for a two-page photo spread. Tokyo: A Certain Style (text/photos by Kyoichi Tsuzuki, translated by Alfred Birnbaum) is (appropriately enough) a small but densely-packed book showing how a wide range of real people in Tokyo furnish/decorate their apartments. In this case, it's the eight-tatami room of an American freelancer in "computer-related fields" who (unlike the wombat-consort) evidently shares my philosophy that the floor is the biggest storage shelf in the house (a phrase picked up from a standup comedian once seen on telly).

(Actually, the very first book I picked up was Tokyopop's English edition of Fruits Basket: Fan Book Cat, but then I remembered that the closest books weren't over there on the table, but piled up in front of my knees in a shelf under the laptop. At least the book on top of the pile wasn't Zoku Kuusou Gendai ^_^;;; )