Books I read as a kid or other books for kids.

Charles A. Sorrel and George F. Sandstrom, "Minerals of the World"

how does the chemistry of merely 2 dozen elements create the 1000s of wildly different minerals?  this is one book i learned chemistry from

 *Lynn Margulis and Karlene Schwartz, "Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth"

100 phyla of critters out there that are more different from each other than plants are from animals, by lifecycle and molecular mechanics


*Borror and White, "Peterson's Field Guide to Insects",

there may be a dozen kinds of mammals lurking 'round your back yard, but you can find at least 500 kinds of insects living there.


Holling Clancy Holling, "Pagoo"

follow the story of a young hermit crab growing up in the sea. jam packed with lush illustrations of all kinds of sea critters and biology


ohn C. Kricher and Gordon Morrison, "Field Guide to Eastern Forests",

go out and see how your landscape is knit together by the myriad creatures, get to know some of them.  great details of ecological processes


*"Golden Guide to Pond Life",
stick it in your back pocket and get to know what's happening at a pond near you.  from microscopic anamalcules to turtles and raccoons


Guy Alexander, "Silica and Me"

thin. easy read. how does a scientist make sense of puzzling experiments? beautiful details. learn some chemistry. geology is silica.  read it.


Duncan C. Blanchard, "From Raindrops to Volcanoes"

a delightful romp through observation and experiment.  how to collect microscopic water drops in sea spray? have a baby spider build you a net...

one scientists experimental journey to understand rain. how to collect microscopic water drops in sea spray? have a baby spider build you a net... 


brand
    whole earth catalog

gardner, martin
    sci am articles
    wheels, life, and other math amusmts   hexflexgons, conway...
    

highwater, jimake
    anpao
    
mcilvain
    1001 fungi

moyers, bill
    conversations I II
    
niven, larry
    ringworld
niven and pournell
    mode in god's eye
    
    
pielou, e. c.
    after the ice age
    
rushdie, salman
    haroun and the sea of stories
    
sagan, carl
    dragons of eden

anything Steinbeck

thomas, lewis
    lives of a cell

A. E. van vogt

wallace, karen an mike bostok (ill.)
    think of an eel  candlewick pr 93  ***
    
    
zalezney
  amber chronicles

all the pocket field guides

Do Mammals or Insects have the largest Range of Masses? Conclusion: Mammals!

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_shrew

1.8g avg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_whale

200tons ==450g/lb *2000lb= 180,000,000g == 1.8x10^8gm


ratio: 1:0^8

large beetles
https://web.archive.org/web/20140820232404/http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/walker/ufbir/chapters/chapter_30.shtml

It is not easy to find reliable weights of insects, also apparently they can considerably bulk up in a day's feeding!  
lets call it 50g

fairy wasp:
https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Dicopomorpha_echmepterygis/

0.2mm  no reported weights.

lets approximate mass pretending they are same density as water.

0.2mm^3 *1cc/1000mm^3 *1g/cc == 0.002mm^3/1000 = 0.000002g
probly an overestimate.

ratio
50g/0.000002g
==25 *10^6/ 0.000002g *10^6
2.5x10^7/2
1x10^7:1

10^7:1

mammals win by a factor of 10

60 Foot stretch of Rensselaer Plateau Graywacke. Too Much Going On Here. Deep Sea Sediments.

Met this rock this weekend. Rensselaer Plateau, Rensselaer Co. NY. (north america) what is going on? to the left is a rather tough grainy sedimentary rock, blends into foliated rock with flat cut face and black and white weathering, and then to right, finer grained rock.  The general rock type here is called Graywacke, which seems to me to be garbage pail rock. Whatever falls into the sea and turns into rock, counts.  In a 60 foot stretch of this along the road it morphed into so many textures... born in deep sea and shoved over the continent when an island arc smashed us 500my ago.

 file:///media/barry/3434-3835/phNew/newPhPics2026_04/20260411_174657.jpg

 

Here is a closeup. VERY messy. to the left is friable rock with layers facing us, but the layers leaving the white weathered lines is perpendicular to that.  I guess it is turbulent in the deep sea. 

 

 

more textures all within a few feet of each other

   

Dunno how this bit formed.  Squiggly yellow green stuff, epidote?

   

this is only a tiny taste of all the morphs that this Rensselear Plataeu Graywacke does.

 Tried to find an online summary of the place but they don't make a LOT of sense.  The geology of the Taconic orogeny is still confusing.

Something Happened Under a Long Lost Ocean

Ok, here's a  picture of my most recent rock.  it's the bedrock behind the Troy Middle School track, New York State, North America.  Transition zone between blobby limestone and flaky shale.  All from deep in the ancient Iapetus Ocean before it got smushed closed 440 million years ago during the Taconic Orogeny (mountain building).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taconic_orogeny

There is a story embedded in this rock, but I'm not sure what it is!  When did the limestone get laid down?  When the shale?  When did they get smashed together like that?  During an earthquake that tumbled the limey ooze and clay mud together higgledy piggledy under the ocean or afterwards when they turned to stone and got shoved up on top of our continent?  Mysteries recorded in the rock.