Did you ever wonder if there is a program that brings pets to shut-ins?

By David McClelland

I really never thought there could be such a program until I was volunteering at St. Joseph Mercy Oakland Hospital recently and, when an elevator door opened, two adults and a young girl got off, each being led by a dog on a leash. Each dog had a red neckerchief with these words printed in white, "Pet the Pet."

I asked the adults about Pet the Pet and they told me they were also volunteers and this program allowed them to bring pets to visit children in hospitals and adults in local area nursing homes and senior housing facilities to boost their spirits.

The program was founded in 1998 for the purpose of providing pet therapy to children and adults using dogs rescued from puppy mills and high skill shelters. Although the rescued animals are wonderful, gentle, loving animals, not all enjoy the intensity of therapy work and these have, over the years, been adopted to homes that are more appropriate to the individual temperament of the animals. Because the supply of animals is greater than the need for therapy purposes, the Pet the Pet Program has chosen to take additional dogs for placement. All dogs have been neutered, wormed, vaccinated, heartworm tested and have loving dispositions. The cost for adopting a dog is $250.

If you are interested in more details, visit their e-mail: reverence@fltg.net.

Did you ever wonder just how much material is recycled each year and where it all goes?

By David McClelland

I dutifully place all our recyclables in our Blue and White Recycle Bin in each week and haul it out to the curb on Tuesday mornings for pick-up. I always wondered where it went and what it amounted to, nationally.

The Birmingham-Bloomfield Eagle recently published statistics which it obtained from Consumer Energy's website for the period from 1992 – 2007. You need to divide the following numbers by 16 to get approximate annual figures.

Antifreeze – More than 300,000 gallons

Used oil – About 4 million gallons

Fuel – 150,000 gallons

Paint – 12,000 gallons

Batteries – 430,000 pounds

Mercury equipment – 21,000 pounds

Metals – 29,000 tons

Corrugated materials – 50,000 yards

Paper – Almost 117,000 yards

Wood and wood products – 189,000 tons

Toner cartridges - 16,000 tons

Lamps – 408,000 pounds

Electronics – 108,000 pounds

Lighting ballasts – Roughly 50,000 pounds

None of the above goes into landfills. Consumers Energy states that, in the last 20 years, there has been enough recycled material to fill 168 Olympic size swimming pools and conserved 551,000 cubic yards of land fill space.  In 2010, there was more than one million pounds of universal waste and it all got recycled in one form or another. That is good news for Planet Earth and for you if you are at all "green."

Now, we both know more about our recycled material.

Did you ever wonder how the Braille system for the blind was created?

By David McClelland

Louis Braille was born in 1809 near Paris, France. He became blind at age three (3) after an accident when he accidently poked himself in the eye with his father's leather awl. Both of his eyes became infected and he lost the sight of both eyes. As he became older, he desperately wanted to be able to read. At age 10, he was sent to a school for the blind in Paris where children were taught to read and write using a system of raised letters. The system was difficult to use as it was hard to tell the letters apart. One day, in 1921, a soldier, Charles Barbier, visited the school. He had devised a system of raised dots to form the alphabet. Braille saw the potential.

At age 15, and three years of experimenting with proposed systems, he devised a simpler system whereby he used just six (6) dots arranged in two vertical columns of three. With just those six dots, he was able to design the 26-letter alphabet, all ten numbers and eleven other symbols representing punctuation marks. The system even has several short words.   When he grew up, he became a teacher in that same school for the blind.

It wasn't until after Braille's death in 1852 that his system was widely adopted and is now used in virtually every country. It has been adapted to every known language. Braille contracted tuberculosis and died in Paris at age 43. His system was officially adopted in France two years after his death and became widely used thereafter.

An example of the Braille system follows. Using two, vertical columns of three dots each, an "a" has one raised dot in the upper left corner. A "b" has the top two dots in the left column raised and a "c" has the top two dots raised, one in each column. Braille reached his goal of having many books of all kinds printed in Braille.

If you want to know more about Braille's life, Margaret Davidson's 1971 book, Louis Braille, the Boy Who Invented Books for the Blind, is a good read. Of course, you can also google "Braille" for a vast amount of information. Now, you know how Braille's system was created.

Did you ever wonder who Sir Isaac Newton was and what he accomplished?

By David McClelland

This is the third in a three-blog series about historical figures. The first two were on Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci.

Sir Isaac Newton lived from 1642 – 1727. He was an English mathematician and physicist. He was one of the foremost scientific intellects of all time. He was born weeks too early and the woman helping with the birth predicted an early death for the weak boy. However, he survived and grew up with his grandmother on the family farm.

Newton was elected a "Fellow" at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1667 and became the "Lucasian Professor of Mathematics" in 1669. He lectured at Cambridge in most years until 1696. Of those years, at which Newton was at the height of his creative powers, he singled out 1665 – 1666 as "the prime of my age for invention." During those two to three years of intense mental effort, he prepared "Philosophic Naturalis Principia Mathematics," commonly known as the Principia, although this was not published until 1687. Newton is credited with inventing calculus. He did experiments with prisms and was the first to determine why the separate colors appear when sunlight passes through a prism. He worked with optics and he was the first to develop a reflecting telescope, which proved to be more powerful than Galileo's refracting telescope, and was quickly accepted.

Newton has been regarded as the founder of modern physical science. His achievements in scientific investigation were as innovative as those in his mathematical research.

There is a popular story that Newton, while observing an apple fall on his head,  suddenly thought of the Universal Law of Gravitation. As in all such legends, this is almost certainly untrue in its details, but the story contains elements of what actually happened. Probably the more correct version of the story is that Newton, upon observing an apple fall from a tree, began to think along the following lines: the apple's velocity was at zero when it was hanging on the tree and, when it fell, it accelerated as it moved toward the ground. Thus, by Newton's 2^nd Law, There must be a force which acts upon the apple to cause this acceleration. Let's call the force "gravity," and the associated acceleration, "the acceleration due to gravity." Then, imagine the apple tree is twice as high and, as the apple falls, it picks up speed in its decent. Newton concluded that the force of an object is equal to its mass times acceleration.

Newton's 1^st Law – An object at rest remains at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. Newton's 3^rd Law – For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. 

Newton died on March 27, 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, a great honor. Now, we all know more about Sir Isaac Newton as well.

Did you ever wonder just who Leonardo da Vinci was and what he accomplished?

 By David McClelland

This is the second in a three-part blog series about historical figures. The last blog covered Galileo and the final one will be on Sir Issac Newton.

Leonardo da Vinci, hereafter called "da Vinci," lived from 1452 – 1519, or for 67 years. He was a Renaissance painter, architect, engineer, mathematician and philosopher; a genius, the likes of which the world may not see again. In addition to being just about the most intelligent person ever, da Vinci is reported to have been an incredibly handsome man with great strength and a beautiful singing voice. He was a vegetarian and followed a very strict diet. In fact, he loved animals so much that he would often buy caged animals at the market just to set them free.

In an era when left-handedness was considered the devil's work and those afflicted were often forced to use their right hands, da Vinci was an unashamed left-handed writer. It has been suggested that this "difference" was an element of his genius, since his detachment allowed him to see beyond the ordinary. He even wrote backwards and his writings are easily deciphered only with a mirror.

The illegitimate son of a 25 year-old notary, Ser Piero, and a peasant girl, Calerina, da Vinci was born on April 5, 1452 in Vinci, Italy, just outside Florence. His father took custody of the little fellow shortly after his birth, while his mother married someone else and moved to a neighboring town. They kept on having children, although not with each other, and they eventually supplied him with 17 half-sisters and half-brothers. Da Vinci died on May 2, 1519 in Clos Luce', France.

Da Vinci's genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. His paintings, Last Supper (1495 – 97) and Mona Lisa (1503 – 1506) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renissance era. The Mona Lisa is now in The Louvre in Paris, France. The Last Supper is in the Santa Marie delle Grazzie Abby in Milan, France. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of his time.

Now, we both know more about the incredible accomplishments of da Vinci.

Did you ever wonder just who Galileo was and what he accomplished?

By David McClelland

This is the first of a three-part blog series about historical figures. They will cover the lives of Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Issac Newton.

I began to wonder about these important historic men while sailing aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, The Freedom of the Seas, two weeks ago on a family vacation.

There were over 4,000 passengers and we took our evening meals in three huge dining rooms named after these men. Let's look first at Galileo.

Galileo Galilei  was born in Pisa, Italy on February 15, 1564. His father was a musician and his family belonged to the nobility, but they were not rich. Galileo never married. However, he had a brief relationship with Marina Gamba; she lived in his house in Padua, where she bore him three children. In 1610, Galileo moved from Padua to Florence, where he took a position at the court of Medici family.

Galileo made his first telescope in 1609, modeled after other telescopes produced in other parts of Europe that could magnify objects by three times. He created a telescope later that same year that would magnify objects by twenty times. With this telescope, he was able to look at the moon, discover the four satellites and Jupiter, observe a supernova, verify the phases of Venus, and discover sunspots. His discoveries proved the Copernican system, which states that the Earth and planets revolve around the sun. Prior to the Copernican system, it was thought that a universe was geo centric, meaning that the sun revolved around the Earth.

Galileo's belief in the Copernican system eventually got him in trouble with the Catholic Church. The inquisition was a permanent institution in the Catholic Church, charged with the eradication of Heresies. The inquisition had decreed that the Copernican proposition was heresy. In 1624, Galileo was informed by Pope Urban 0111 that he could write about the Copernican theory as long as he treated in as a mathematical proposition. However, with the printing of Galileo's book containing dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, Galileo was called to Rome in 1633 to face the inquisition again. Galileo was found guilty and was sent to his home near Florence, where he was to be under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

In 1642, he died in his home outside Florence.

Did you ever wonder what happens to a diamond from the mine to the jewelry store?

By David McClelland

We just returned from a Caribbean Cruise where the on-board shopping gal told us something of the journey of a diamond from the mine to the jewelry store. I just did the research and I thought
it was interesting. I will share what I learned here with you. You won't believe how long and complex the diamond's journey is.

A diamond's journey began deep within the earth – 100 to 200 miles below the surface. Diamonds were formed up to 3.3 billion years ago as a result of unimaginable heat and pressure that were placed upon carbon crystals there.

Powerful volcanic activity formed what are known as "pipes" – openings in the earth – and the immense pressure forced the diamonds up through the pipes to the surface, along with other minerals such as kimbertite. Some of these diamonds made their way into streams, rivers and seas; however, these are considered to be only secondary deposits. Most of the diamonds forced up through the earth settled back into the kimbertite pipes – and it is these primary sources that have been the basis of the world's diamond mines. Only one in 200 kimbertite pipes contains diamonds in economically viable quantities.

Once discovered, diamonds can be difficult to mine. Estimates are that it takes over 250 tones of ore to produce just one carat of rough diamond. The ore goes through many stages of blasting, crushing and processing, including advanced x-ray techniques, to release the diamond. More that 120 million carats are mined each year, but only about 30 million, or about ¼ of the stones mined, are considered gem quality.

Although diamonds are found in numerous locations around the world, about 80% come from Australia, Botswana, Canada, Namibia, South Africa and Russia.

Once the diamonds have been mined and processed, the next step is to sort, classify, and value them according to their size, shape, quality and color. De Beers' marketing arm, DTC, sorts some two-thirds of the world's diamonds by value and then into more than 16,000 categories. They are then sold ten times a year at regular, invitation-only, sales called "sights" to the world's leading diamond cutters, polishers and manufacturers. Sightholders may choose to cut the rough they buy themselves or may sell some percentage to smaller manufacturers or wholesalers.

The next step for the rough diamond is cutting and polishing. This takes great skill, with meticulous techniques that have been practiced for generations. The main diamond cutting and trading centers are based in Antwerp, Belgium; Mumbai, India; Tel Aviv, Israel; New York; and Johannesburg, South Africa. China and Thailand have most recently developed their own centers.

Although some of the polishing process is computerized, most of the work is still performed by hand. Initially, the cutter uses cleaving, sawing or laser cutting to separate the original rough into smaller, more workable pieces. Then, the girdler uses a process called bruting that grinds away the stone's edges and provides its outline shape. Faceting follows, usually in two steps. The first 18 facets (table, culet, bezel, and pavilion of a stone) are cut and polished by a blocker. The brillianteer cuts and polishes the final 40 facets, including the star, upper girdle and lower girdle. Finally, the cut gem is boiled in acids to remove dust and oil. Once polished, most diamonds are sold and traded in the 24 registered diamond bourses around the world.

At this point, the polished gems are ready to be set into finished pieces of jewelry, which is the manufacturer's responsibility. The pieces are then sold to either a wholesaler, who works as a middleman to sell the manufacturer's goods to the retailer, or directly to the retailer by the manufacturer.

Now, the finished diamond goes on display in a jewelry store near you. Then comes the part where you walk by the jewelry store window and a beautiful diamond grabs your eye and you either shrug and keep on walking or your enter the store to take a closer look. Did you ever guess that a diamond's journey was so far and took so long? Whew!!!