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Mineral Identification, Quartz Varieties & Geological Misconceptions A Blog by Luke J Timberlake ✏️ Owning the kind of shop that I do — which is admittedly very niche — allows me to see people’s presets and presumptions about minerals firsthand. I get to see how thrown people are when you show them a white celestine…

Quartz Crystals, Radio Communication & Piezoelectricity A Blog by Luke J Timberlake I don’t want this to sound crazily dramatic, because quartz didn’t “win” World War Two, but it played a role profoundly more significant than people like to imagine. It’s one of those things that tends to get either wildly overstated or completely ignored

A Blog by Luke J Timberlake ✏️ There are a whole bunch of predatory marketing techniques that punctuate this industry. Some are worse than others, and some are even worse than the one I’m discussing today. But just because something questionable exists on a spectrum doesn’t mean each area of that spectrum doesn’t deserve scrutiny.

BLOG BY PUFFINS & PIES Those of us who grew up before digital thermometers will remember them well: the slender glass thermometer that our mothers produced at the first sign of a fever. Few of us ever stopped to think about what that shimmering silver liquid inside was—until one shattered on the floor and tiny

BLOG BY PUFFINS & PIES How to Identify Real vs Fake Turquoise Etymology: The Origin of Turquoise The word turquoise comes from the French turquois, meaning “Turkish”, because traders brought much of it to Europe through the Ottoman Empire. Although the term appeared in the 17th century, people had known the stone for thousands of