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Sand, Mineral links, and a blog link!

oh so so many years ago, this page dealt with my dad's many accomplishments during his career as a sand plant engineer for OI, Owens-Illinois Glass Company. but he has been retired for a long time now, so this page is more about links to his various interests now, and anything that i found to be interesting and related to gems, minerals, and sand. so that's all you get. oh right, my dad's name is james hallsted. i bet you thought that i would keep you guessing on that one :)

the only other thing to add here is a new link to my new web page... me being michael hallsted that is... i decided that i want my 15 minutes of fame, so i am starting a page where i am going to write about my life's story. this will be an ongoing story that will probably take me the next 40 years to finish. some people might call it a blog, but a blog is just a page that gets updated at semi regular intervals. nothing special about that, and i don't need no stinking blog software to do it for me. it's just text on a web page, and i know how to do that for myself... thank you very much. anyway, once it gets indexed by the search engines, i figure that my auto biography will live forever. anyway, here is the link to my auto biography: michael lawrence hallsted's life story! started on Saturday, November 26, 2005

Now for some mineral related links of interest...

Loes Modderman : Microscopic Science Art

sand from the netherlands

a salt crystal

to quote Loes Modderman in her own words....

The pictures on this site are taken through a polarization-microscope. The colorful images you are looking at are crystallizations of chemical substances. Micro-crystals are made by dissolving a chemical and evaporating the solvent by heating, or otherwise. During this process tiny crystals appear, which can be studied in polarized light. Almost every chemical crystallizes under the right circumstances in an endless variety of form and structure. Nothing but optical coloring is used. The pictures are taken with a camera mounted on the microscope. Magnification: Imagine the pictures covering an area of ą 1 mm2.

The National Speleological Society

pretty much anything you want to know about caves can be found here.

Cave Photography by Bob Biddix
and if you want to look at cave pictures, then this is the site for you.

Minerals A-Z
This is a good site that has pictures and a lot of technical information on minerals of all types.

Gem Hut
It is an online store, but... it's a good place with great pictures and information about gemstones of all types.

John Betts - Fine Minerals
man, is this a beautiful site!! they have got everything under the sun and gorgeous pictures!! excellent site! very large but easy to navigate. if you like rocks, you'll like john betts.

One of the main purposes of mining sand is to make glass.
The Corning Museum of Glass
is a good site to learn about glass making. The museum is located in Corning, NY, USA

http://neic.usgs.gov/
This link is to the National Earthquake Information Center [aka] World Data Center for Seismology in Denver, Colorado, USA. Anything and everything you wanted to know about earthquakes can be found here.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/
Earthquakes home page for recent earthquake activity anywhere in the world. When I first saw my dad's bookmark to this page, all it said was 'quake home'. And all I thought was "what the heck is my dad bookmarking websites for the video game quake", silly me.

pictures from the hubble space telescope!
that's right, if you want to see what outer space looks like, this is the source!! feast your eyes and save your stomach!
pretty cool place! and i don't mean outer space... but the web depository of hubble telescope images! have a look yourself if you don't beleive me...

these pages were created with and will be maintained by arachnophilia!

take what comfort you can, assure yourself endlessly, rationalize all you want,
but..... all of the links on this page worked for me on:
Saturday, March 19, 2005

comments concerning this website should be addressed to: michael hallsted